The book is told from the perspective of a pre-teen girl named Baby. She’s named Baby, she thinks, because her parents were both 15 when they had her and she assumes her parents were children themselves when they had her.
Her mother died when she was nothing but an infant and she has no memory of her, and in the true fashion of literature, you are teased with her memory, just like Baby is, until the very end of the book. Predictable, but classic.
Baby is raised solely by her father, a “recovering” heroine addict. He tries to take care of her, but his addiction to “chocolate milk” and his love for quick-money-making schemes, doesn’t exactly make him the perfect parent.
They move from place to place in seedy downtown Montreal. They are in the worst areas of town, and Baby is making the most interesting friends.
The book explores how mature relationships between 11-12 year olds who wish they could just be children can be.
She moves from home to home to foster home to town to city to home again. Without giving too much away, this girl does not live in the same place for more then a year.
Later in the book, at the age of 13, she captures the attention of a local Pimp. He falls in love with her, as only a pimp can.
At 13, she is trying to be a woman, she wants to be a troubled adult, not a child from a broken home. She pushes herself into becoming disturbed grown women. She pushes herself to die inside, to lose her emotion, to become a shell of herself, just so she can fit in with her junkie father, his junkie friends and the prostitutes who fill her life with “adult guidance”.
The book is described as “heart-wrenching” and I do believe that if you invest yourself into it, and really read what is in front of you without criticizing that she’s 12, without feeling dirty in your safe little life for peeking into Baby’s daily occurrences, without feeling sorry that children really do experience this kind of life, you will see a touching story of a little girl’s love for her father and a little girl’s love for the childhood she never had.
I warn you now, there are some scenes in the book that will make your skin crawl, there are scenes in the book that will make you want to cry. But when you finish this book and have read it cover to cover, you will feel that you gained something.
(7/10)
