I said it at least three other times, but I will say it again: that was depressing. I don’t know what I was thinking when I chose the book for my English course (honestly, the title caught my attention - it sounded cool and somber and edgy). Lullabies for Little Criminals was not the kind of bad where it was choppy and hard to actually get through, but rather it was the kind of bad that was Twilight by Stephenie Meyer bad - the writing is easy to follow, but everything else is just … not that great. Basically, I found a few things off about the book: A. First off, it was really problematic - and I hate that word so I am definitely not using it lightly! Disclaimer: I think writing, and any form of expression, deserves to be problematic because it is a reflection of real life which is, ultimately, problematic (yikes). This book referenced and narrated really sensitive topics - and I understand the point of that, as I have discussed in previous posts - but it honestly did not have the right setting or context to do so effectively. No one can deny that the issues discussed exist (child abuse, emotional neglect, underage sex work, drug abuse, etc.). However, there are definitely MUCH better ways to preface and develop these problems in a fictional story than to do it through a prepubescent girl. Imagine reading and stumbling across this quote: “Children make the best prostitutes because they’re the most perfunctory about the whole encounter” (O’Neill). My gut reaction was to throw the book as far away as possible, which I obviously could not do due to academic responsibility. I am still not sure, though, that there is a better reaction to the idea that an adult author wrote this line as the passing thought of a 12 year old. B. The characters were not well written. Their personalities came off cliched at the start: Baby was the curious cat and her father was the clueless goldfish. They managed to stay that way even though they both seemed to go through many difficult moments. Because Baby is the main character, I focused the most on her development (or lack thereof). Baby recounts everything as if she was watching grass grow and she never voices any emotional reaction: “He had intense gravitational force … If I kicked my shoes up in the air, they would go into orbit around him” (O’Neill). It is disconcerting for a reader to read emotional events in this way. In other aspects of my summative assignment, I explore the effect of Jules’ emotional neglect on Baby. I tried to make an argument that could point to her emotional development: that point was about how her view of beautiful things became jaded. I could not find sufficient evidence to show her aging emotionally. Baby stays the same from beginning to end. As for other characters, they never stuck around long enough to develop, so the criticism is lost there. C. Finally, going off of the two points mentioned above, the story is not effective or impressionable. These types of real-life-is-terrible-and-raw stories can be written tactfully (See: Khaled Hosseini, author of super depressing, super effective, and really impactful novels), but this book seems to miss the points. My one consistent emotion going through the story was distaste. Since the characters were so flat, it was genuinely difficult to follow the chronological order of things; the character does not express any change to other characters so I got the impression that time was just not happening at all. I also did not enjoy the subject matter. I had to dig really, really deep to connect to the plot and to the main character. At the end, I had a lot of questions concerning the events, I was baffled by how emotionally unchanged the characters seemed to be, and for those reasons the purpose of the novel (to inspire some kind of reaction regarding the atrocity of drug/sex culture) was not fulfilled. I always extract some kind of lesson from everything I read, and I guess this book taught me that coming-of-age modern young adult fiction is not my genre (unless it is dystopian). Tags: #lullabiesforlittlecriminals #bookreview #englishclassblogpost #notgood #reallyexaggeratedbadreview Works Cited
ONeill, Heather. Lullabies for Little Criminals: a novel. Harper Perennial, 2016. Giphy. “Animated Gifs.” GIPHY, www.giphy.com [used for all pictures found in blog post] Disclaimer: I read the book on a Kindle, and therefore do not know the page numbers for the quotes
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