45 pages • 1 hour read
Heather O'NeillLullabies for Little Criminals
Fiction | 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 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “the last time we were children”
Chapter 1 Summary
Jules’s health declines; he coughs frequently and is cold all the time. He gets admitted to a long-term hospital for tuberculosis. Baby gets taken to a foster home.
Chapter 2 Summary
Baby is the only girl in a foster home full of boys; she considers them all to be losers, but she quickly befriends them anyway. She finds out Jules is going to be in the hospital longer than expected, and she starts “cursing more and throwing bottles against train tracks. I did these things for no good reason. I didn’t know anyone whose father lived in a hospital” (29).
Chapter 3 Summary
Linus Lucas arrives at the foster home. He is fourteen and explains “how his mother was white and his father was black” (29). He is cooler than the other foster kids, and it’s clear that he’s been in the system for a long time; while the other kids daydream about their parents rescuing them, he seems removed from that hope. Linus and Baby quickly become friends. He thinks she’s cool because she and her dad are from Montreal, and Montreal is nothing but cool in his eyes.
One day, the foster kids go into town. A boy beats up Linus and steals his prized Walkman. The other kids are shocked that Linus wasn’t tougher, considering the façade of cool that he emits. Linus’s uncle comes to visit him at the foster home. When he finds out what happened, he berates Linus and humiliates him in front of everyone. He takes the side of the boy who stole the Walkman, saying, “A spoiled motherfucker, that’s what you are. I want you to make some money and pay me for that Walkman. I bought that downtown” (38).
Chapter 4 Summary
A twelve-year-old boy named Zachary comes to the foster home. He and Baby share a bedroom and become quick friends, especially now that Linus stays to himself most of the time. Zachary always talks about his mother, which makes Baby jealous: “I wanted to think about my mother, too, but I couldn’t come up with much. Jules never liked talking about her” (44).
Part 2 Analysis
In this section, Baby goes to live in the foster home because Jules is hospitalized with TB. She misses Jules, but for the first time she gets the constant attention that she desperately craves: she gets along well with the other boys, and her caretaker, Isabelle, fulfills the maternal role that she’s been missing her whole life. She begins to really feel like she’s part of a family. She especially grows close to Linus and Zachary, and each boy fulfills a different need in her life.
Linus is older and everyone thinks he’s cool: he talks about the city, pretends he’s high, and constantly listens to his Walkman. At first, Baby looks up to him and is happy that he shows her attention. After he gets beat up and then publicly belittled by his uncle, she feels sorry for him. After this event, Linus retreats to his room, and Baby becomes close to Zachary. They share a room, and Baby becomes enamored by the way that he talks about his mother. Listening to his stories about his mother allows her to live vicariously and makes her wish she could imagine her own mother.
