Charismatic Marie Antoine is the daughter of the richest man in 19th century Montreal. She has everything she wants, except for a best friend—until clever, scheming Sadie Arnett moves to the neighborhood. Immediately united by their passion and intensity, Marie and Sadie attract and repel each other in ways that thrill them both. Their games soon become tinged with risk, even violence. Forced to separate by the adults around them, they spend years engaged in acts of alternating innocence and depravity. And when a singular event brings them back together, the dizzying effects will upend the city.
O’Neill...knits well-observed statements into the colorful patchwork of her quirky, vibrant story. Her prose is riddled with simile; sometimes these delightful images capture the situation, the object, the person described, and sometimes they pull the reader into distraction ... At once off-putting and seductive, the temptation in this kind of narration is to become obsessed with the cleverness of an imagination seemingly influenced by hallucinogenic drugs ... O’Neill highlights the limits of women’s lives as sexual objects and disposable workers, the violent gender imbalances embedded in society, and the excesses of the rich against the despair and suffering of the poor ... When We Lost Our Heads shares the oddball descriptions so characteristic of O’Neill’s voice as a narrator and combines brilliant observations with a simple style that sometimes reads like a children’s book—or a writer trying to sound like she is 13 years old. This is both the novel’s attraction and its weakness ... The historical world of the late 1800s that O’Neill recreates is fascinating and highly entertaining due to this sassy point of view ... Men get sliced down to size by her piercing wit, and O’Neill writes a satisfying herstory interpretation of events. The plot satisfies with twists and turns to the end, but it’s the audaciousness of spirit emboldening most of her female characters that makes this novel shine.
These perversely fascinating characters are filled with guile and bile and many things vile, and even though it’s virtually a certainty that they are star-crossed, it’s impossible to tear one’s gaze away ... O’Neill is sufficiently deft to keep the reader in suspense ... This is not a book for the faint of heart or Victorian sensibility, but it does encompass a fair amount of sugar . . . and spice.
