12 year old Baby lives with her 27 year old father Jules in a run down apartment in Montreal. She's known little else of life, seeing that her mother was tragically killed at a young age, and for the most part, life's been okay with Jules. He tries hard and he provides what he can when he can.

Except, now that Baby is at that tender age of awareness of adults and their faults, she's realizing Jules is far more troubled than she ever believed. He is in and out of rehab for drugs, for illness, for being an all together wreck of a human being. Baby herself shifts from an apartment with Jules to a home for children then back to life with Jules and then, ultimately, the most painful life: living with the man who took away all of her innocence.

O'Neill's book was incredibly hard to read, as Baby's story begins as entirely optimistic, despite being dark and painful. Being Jules's age, I kept finding myself caring a lot about his story and worrying about him in a way that Baby purposefully didn't -- which is testament to the skill of the writing, I think. As much as this is Baby's story, she herself is so outwardly focused that she doesn't realize how much life around her impacts her directly. She's very much looking for that silver lining and appreciating it on immense levels.

But Baby loses so much of herself when (view spoiler)[ she falls into being abused sexually. While she agrees to being sexually active with older men, agrees to being prostituted out, it's downright abuse of her. As readers, we watch her innocence being raped away, and more than once I had to put the book down and just stop because I was crying so hard. (hide spoiler)] O'Neill captures that precarious age quite well, and the lens through which Baby accepts what she has is tough to understand, tough to grasp, but it's also painfully easy to "get." It shouldn't be, but since we're so drawn into how her world operates, this feels like it is right. At least, that's what she tells herself and what she tells readers. We know it's not the truth though.

The little moments of reflection, which are subtle and nuanced, sing throughout. I loved being in Baby's world, despite how awful it was, because for the most part, she looks for those moments and depends upon them to bring her through. At least that's the case in the first half of the book, and it's in the second that I found Baby to lose a lot of that wonder. No surprise that she would, of course, but it was here where I felt like some of Baby's voice shifted and became less her and more adult-reflecting-upon-what-that's-like. I found this especially true (view spoiler)[ when Baby would start talking about how boys couldn't get her off and when she made love to people. The language didn't work for me, the way she spelled it out and understood these very adult sexual things, particularly when she herself was such a victim of adults abusing her. I'd expect sharper lines and harder edges to impact her understanding of these experiences, as well as way less maturity. (hide spoiler)]

I loved the almost-vignette style to the story, and it reminded me in many ways of Douglas Coupland's "Life After God" in execution and the way those small moments all amount to something greater. Or at least they're working toward making that happen, even if they never do. The language sings in this book, and it's both a comfort and a discomforting thing. I think teen readers looking for adult lit will dig this one because even though Baby is 12, her story is far more mature beyond her years and yet she's utterly easy for teens to relate to. It's dark and tough to stomach, so it's not for the faint of heart.

Longer review likely to come.