The Lonely Hearts Hotel – Book Review

Title: The Lonely Hearts Hotel

Author: Heather O’Neill

Number of Pages:  391 pages

Publisher: Riverhead Books

Publication Date: February 7, 2017

Purchase: Thriftbooks//Amazon

My Rating: 3/5 stars

Synopsis from Goodreads:

With echoes of The Night Circus, 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 1910. 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.

My Thoughts:

I did not know what I was walking into with this book. The opening was disturbing and it only went down from there. This book is dark and twisted and normally would be right up my alley but this one did not do it for me. The writing was beautiful though, amazing and depressing. She nailed the tone perfectly. I was expecting something close to Night Circus and what we got was much darker.

One of the hardest parts of this book is how slow paced it is. It spans many years and there is nothing wrong with that but it drags on. I kept putting this book down and coming back to it because I would lose interest very easily. I bought it in March, started it when I bought it and finished it in July.

I have a very love-hate relationship with this book. It is one of those that I am hesitant to recommend because this book would offend a good chunk of people that would ask me about this book.

What books are you trying to tackle this summer?

I am also trying to get more into fantasy and sci-fi so if anyone has any recommendations, please send them my way.