45 pages • 1 hour read
Heather O'NeillLullabies for Little Criminals
Heather O'NeillFiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “life with jules”
Chapter 1 Summary
Baby is twelve when the novel begins. She and Jules, her dad, are moving into a run-down apartment called the Ostrich Hotel. The room “had the smell of wet clothes and pot that our last apartment had. It smelled as if a florist shop had caught on fire and all the flowers were burning” (2). It’s clear that she and her dad move frequently.
She explains that she was called Baby because her mom and dad had her when they were only fifteen, and only young parents would think of such a name. Her mom died when she was a baby, leaving her dad to care for her by himself; he’s now a twenty-six-year-old heroin addict.
Chapter 2 Summary
It’s Baby’s twelfth birthday, and Jules makes her a homemade piñata. His best friend Lester comes over to help them celebrate, but instead they get high on heroin while Baby watches TV. She feels abandoned; “I was still clingy like a little kid with Jules and I hated when he dumped me like that. I was so lonely all of a sudden. When I felt lonely, I really felt lonely” (12).
She wanders to a skating rink and finds children she knows from the neighborhood. An older girl, Marika, tells her that she “had sex with a man for fifty bucks” (16). This makes Baby feel uncomfortable. She still wants to be a child, realizing that once you’re not a child anymore, “there’s no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could” (17).
Jules and Baby talk that night, and he confides that he hated his dad and living in Val des Loups. Jules often tells Baby stories from his past, but they’re usually exaggerated and she feels like she doesn’t really know much about him.
Part 1 Analysis
These chapters demonstrate the dangerous world that envelopes Baby and her desire to stay innocent despite her environment. Her greatest desire is to have Jules’s attention, but she rarely gets it as Jules’s greatest desire is for heroin. This leaves Baby feeling constantly lonely. As demonstrated in Chapter 2, Baby seeks the attention of those around her in order to combat her loneliness, but this leaves her in a vulnerable position, since many of the people around Baby are drug addicts, struggling with mental illness, or doing illegal activities. When Baby attempts to hang out with Marika, a familiar face in the neighborhood who is close to her age, Baby is quickly aware that Marika is a threat to her innocence.
Baby is aware that her childhood innocence is a delicate and precious thing, and she fights hard to keep it. However, her desire to make friendships and connections often makes her helpless against entities that want to steal her innocence. Baby wants to be Marika’s friend, but Marika wants Baby to lose her innocence like her. This demonstrates how youthful criminal behavior is cyclical, and how it thrives without adult supervision.
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