McGill Reads "Lullabies for Little Criminals" by Heather O’Neill

If you miss the insightful discussions of the classroom or just love to read, this is your chance to discover thought-provoking books and meet new people while learning from some of McGill’s favourite professors without tests, papers, or evaluations!

There is a registration fee of $15 per person for the semester, which covers refreshments, room rentals, and other book club expenses. Book club members benefit from a 10% discount on all book club books at the University Bookstore.

Heather O’Neill dazzles with a first novel of extraordinary prescience and power, a subtly understated yet searingly effective story of a young life on the streets - and the strength, wits and luck necessary for survival. At thirteen, Baby vacillates between childhood comforts and adult temptation: still young enough to drag her dolls around in a vinyl suitcase, yet old enough to know more than she should about urban cruelties. Motherless, she lives with her father Jules, who takes better care of his heroin habit than he does of his daughter. Baby’s gift is a genius for spinning stories and for cherishing the small crumbs of happiness that fall into her lap. But her blossoming beauty has captured the attention of a charismatic and dangerous local pimp who runs an army of sad, slavishly devoted girls - a volatile situation even the normally oblivious Jules cannot ignore.

Heather O’Neill, BA’94, is a Canadian novelist, poet, short story writer, screenwriter and journalist. She is a contributor to "This American Life" on U.S. public radio and her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine. Her debut novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals, won the 2007 CBC Canada Reads national book competition. She describes writing a novel as "kind of like putting together a robot without an instruction manual. Every word is a nut or screw and there are hundreds of thousands of them."

Future Reads:

October 29, 2008 - Discussion with Leonard Moore on The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dustbowl by Timothy Egan

November 26 - Perceval: The Story of the Grail by Chrétien de Troyes