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I was talking to a friend about this novel a few days ago, and following this conversation, I have to change my rating from 4 to 5 stars. Because I keep recommending it to everyone. Because I still think about it all the time over a year after I read it, because Pierrot and Rose and the way their story ended haunts me. So to Hell with the few editing lapses that annoyed me: when a book gets under your skin the way this one did, it deserves a full five stars and a spot on the “favorites�� shelf.

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This book had been on my radar for a while, and not just because of the (utterly inappropriate) comparison to “The Night Circus��, a book I guiltily adored a few years ago (/review/show...). I had a feeling that “The Lonely Hearts Hotel�� was a romance, a genre that I have mixed feelings about at the best of times. And I was ready to overlook that, because I enjoy stories of star-crossed lovers just as much as the next gal: but if you put those poor doomed idiots in my beloved city, during a time period I am mildly obsessed with, then add a good dose of grit and sex, and sprinkle a bit of music and vaguely circus-inspired performances (a local obsession, after all), then you have sold me a book! And since I have no problem with “bad words�� that start with C (though context is key here) and decadent settings, this book seemed tailor-made to make me happy.

Pierrot and Rose are born in just about the worse circumstances one can imagine: one is the product of an incestuous rape, while the other’s mother was kicked out of her house for letting herself be impregnated by a neighborhood boy. They end up in a seedy, nun-managed orphanage on the northern edge of Montreal, in 1914. It’s a horrible way to grow up, in a dirty Dickensian sort of way: cold winters, hard manual work, senseless beatings and punishments, no affection�� and sometimes entirely the wrong kind of affection. The only good thing those two abandoned children have is each other: Pierrot quickly shows great talent for the piano, and Rose is a gifted dancer and acrobat, which could be their ticket to a better life - but fate has something very different in store for them. While the way they feel about each other is obvious to everyone, they are cruelly separated and thrown into the unfriendly world of the Great Depression, where only the most ruthless people thrive, while the sentimental artists are bound to face the unhappiest of circumstances. And those circumstances will be both highly disturbing and graphically described.

I would call this novel magical realism, because even if nothing particularly magical happens (again, nothing like “The Night Circus��, where things are literally magical), you have to suspend disbelief to enjoy this story. The very essence of Pierrot and Rose’s characters are as unrealistic as they come: Pierrot is ethereally, delicately beautiful, can talk like a gentleman and play the piano like a prodigy while Rose has a will of iron, a bottomless imagination and the kind of big dark eyes that apparently renders everyone helpless. People like that simply don’t exist, but it’s lovely to imagine that they do and that they find each other. It’s also lovely to imagine that their bond is strong enough to survive destitution, drug addition, abject poverty and every imaginable kind of abuse. I am kind of a sucker for stories about how the downtrodden and misfits manage to find happiness in the ugly, messed-up world they live in, and this is the essence of this book. I like the juxtaposition of the elegant and delicate aesthetic of the 30s splattered in the squalor of street life: there's something twisted and sensual in this story that you can't look away from, and the images O'Neill created and put in my head are vulgar, surreal, beautiful and outrageous. Her characters�� thoughts about desire, love and their options (or lack thereof) in a world that preys on dreamers and women are tragic, poetic, paradoxical and depressing. But oh so charmingly written. And while the end is predictably tragic, it strikes a perfectly satisfying and balanced note.

The only problem I have with this book is that the prose is sporadically uneven : O’Neill goes from ornately crafted paragraphs that summon incredible images and feelings�� to short, flat sentences that don’t seem like they were worked on at all. And occasionally, her turn of phrase is pretty inconsistent with the setting of her story. This may not seem like much, but it felt very jarring to me, because it essentially pulled me out of the story every time I would hit one of those underworked sentences, or anachronistic words. And I really, really wanted to lose myself in her world, no matter how twisted and fucked up it got! So regardless of how weird and titillating the story is, I knew early it could never be a 5-star read, just because the editor had not been rigorous enough�� I enjoyed it enough to keep it at 4 stars, but this irritant was hard to get over. Please don’t let my complaint stop you: if you can’t stomach stories about sexual abuse, violence, drug addiction and animal abuse, then avoid this book. Otherwise, it is absolutely worth checking it out. Yup, it is a historical romance, but it’s neither prim nor saccharine, and when it's well written, it’s intoxicating.