In her debut novel, This American Life contributor O'Neill offers a narrator, Baby, coming of age in Montreal just before her 12th birthday. Her mother is long dead. Her father, Jules, is a junkie who shuttles her from crumbling hotels to rotting apartments, his short-term work or moneymaking schemes always undermined by his rage and paranoia. Baby tries to screen out the bad parts by hanging out at the community center and in other kids' apartments, by focusing on school when she can and by taking mushrooms and the like. (She finds sex mostly painful.) Stints in foster care, family services and juvenile detention ("nostalgia could kill you there") usually end in Jules's return and his increasingly erratic behavior. Baby's intelligence and self-awareness can't protect her from parental and kid-on-kid violence, or from the seductive power of being desired by Alphonse, a charismatic predator, on the one hand, and by Xavier, an idealistic classmate, on the other. When her lives collide, Baby faces choices she is not equipped to make.

This is a truly amazing book! I will send this off with another Calgary BookCrosser to read and then re-release for the Canada Challenge. Enjoy!
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DEAR FINDER,
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picked up at the april meeting!

This was a harsh book. My heart broke at the obstacles that are portrayed facing kids who grow up in communities filled with poverty, addiction and crime. The twelve year old narrator, Baby, is being groomed by a local pimp - hooking her with affection that she's not getting from her heroin addicted single father. Before he fully has his snares in her, Baby is sent to juvie for being a pimp's girlfriend (NOT prostitution) and it's from this point that her downward spiral truly begins. Due to a crappy policy, Baby is not allowed back to her regular school - where she had always been an honour roll student - after her month in Juvie and is sent to a school for kids falling through the cracks academically and behaviourally.

It was a perfect example of the hippocrisy of government policies that keep the cycle of poverty going while castigating people for not pulling themselves up by their boot straps. I would call this speculative fiction as the author mixed several experiences from her lower-class childhood to create Baby, a child strong enough to break free.

In the mail to London for the Quebec festival! While it won't make it for Canada Day due to the postal strike they are running events until July 21st.

To the finder:
Calgary has an active group of BookCrossers that meet to swap books and discuss book crossing every second Saturday of the month at 11am at the Joshua Tree Cafe on Edmonton Trail. We always love to meet new crossers, so please join us any time you like!

And another absolutely perfect addition to our array of Québécois books that we are offering to our audiences. Thank you so much - this looks like a great read. Thank you again megami-no-ushi for your contributions to the success of our festival. We hope that they will find appreciative readers and continue to travel.

This book was won this evening by a participant at our Panorama of Québec Literature Reading Group event, the last event of this year's festival. The winner appeared delighted so we hope this is just another stage in a longer journey for this book.