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"So filled with vivid descriptions and complex characters that the reader's experience is virtually cinematic. . . Utterly compelling." – The Washington Post
From the author of When We Lost Our Heads, a spellbinding story about two gifted orphans – in love with each other since they can remember – whose childhood talents allow them to rewrite their future.
The Lonely Hearts Hotel is a love story with the power of legend. An unparalleled tale of charismatic pianos, invisible dance partners, radicalized chorus girls, drug-addicted musicians, brooding clowns, and an underworld whose economy hinges on the price of a kiss. In a landscape like this, it takes great creative gifts to thwart one’s origins. It might also take true love.
Two babies are abandoned in a Montreal orphanage in the winter of 1914. Before long, their talents emerge: Pierrot is a piano prodigy; Rose lights up even the dreariest room with her dancing and comedy. As they travel around the city performing clown routines, the children fall in love with each other and dream up a plan for the most extraordinary and seductive circus show the world has ever seen.
Separated as teenagers, sent off to work as servants during the Great Depression, both descend into the city’s underworld, dabbling in sex, drugs and theft in order to survive. But when Rose and Pierrot finally reunite beneath the snowflakes – after years of searching and desperate poverty – the possibilities of their childhood dreams are renewed, and they’ll go to extreme lengths to make them come true. Soon, Rose, Pierrot and their troupe of clowns and chorus girls have hit New York, commanding the stage as well as the alleys, and neither the theater nor the underworld will ever look the same.
With her musical language and extravagantly realized world, Heather O’Neill enchants us with a novel so magical there is no escaping its spell.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
February 7, 2017 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781524749651
- File size: 346769 KB
- Duration: 12:02:26
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Starred review from March 6, 2017
In a love story of epic proportions, O'Neill's (Daydreams of Angels) excellent historical novel plumbs the depths of happiness and despair for two orphans determined not to let the world get them down. Stepping into the minds of children, circus performers, prostitutes, gangsters, and into the dismal days of the Great Depression, the world on these pages is unforgettable and larger than the moon. Pierrot and Rose are abandoned to an orphanage in 1914 Montreal, where they grow up together and discover their talent for absurdist, Vaudevillian-style performances in front of the other orphan children, then later in front of rich patrons in the city. Pierrot, with his mesmerizing piano, and Rose, with her invisible dancing bear, make lavish plans for their artistic career, fall in love with each other, and are inseparableâuntil they are forced apart as teens. Through the ensuing years, each holds on to their dreams of extravagant circus shows and of finding each other again, while entering a dark world of drugs, sex, starvation, and survival. At the very end of the tunnel are floodlights to the stage, sad clowns, gigantic moon props, chorus girls, and the one thing that time and distance cannot diminishâtrue love grander than any circus act. This novel will cast a spell on readers from page one. -
Narrator Julia Whelan's refined, feminine voice might seem a strange choice for this moody, peculiar novel heavily laced with violence and vulgarity. But Whelan's pleasant style is perfectly suited to the almost magical, scintillating tale of Pierrot and Rose. Abandoned in an orphanage as babies, they perform an eccentric musical act during their adolescent years--but are separated as young adults, each making his or her way in the dark side of the city during the Great Depression. In the midst of describing their miserable lives, Whelan shines in her understated delivery of Heather O'Neill's rich and delightful similes. This is a beautifully rendered novel, simultaneously menacing and vibrant, and Whelan's unobtrusive narration does it full justice. N.M.C. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
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