If you’ve read The Lonely Hearts Hotel or The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, you are well-versed in Heather O’Neill’s penchant for soul relationships – those so closely intertwined that it seemed each person involved cannot exist without the other. Her newest novel, When We Lost our Heads, is a nod to the French revolution and explores another such relationship, one so passionate, so all-consuming, that it changes the course of history forever.
Marie Antoine is the charismatic heiress of a sugar empire and is, without question, the most captivating child in Golden Mile, Montreal. When enigmatic, shadowed Sadie Arnett moves to town, Marie and Sadie find their matches in each other, as sudden and intense as light to dark. Immediately the two are infatuated, caught in a world where they are the only two people. With one misstep and two gunshots, their bond is forever altered; the girls are immediately separated and Sadie is exiled to another corner of the world. Though they could not be further apart, the girls never forget each other. When they reunite years later, the outcomes are so powerful that Montreal threatens to never be the same again.
While this powerful novel explores many themes, including gender, class, and power, at its core is the strength of the human heart, the dangers of deep love, and how some bonds are too strong to ever let go. Set against the undertone of a worker’s revolution and the fight to gain women’s rights, this novel has something for the romantic, the historian, the thinker, and the seeker of complexity. I highly recommend this novel – best enjoyed with a steaming cup of tea and a critical mind.
Ginny Dunnill is a Community Services Librarian at Richmond Public Library.
