I am all for feral girls & women fiercely loving each other & revolutionary rage. When We Lost Our Heads delivered.

We follow two affluent girls in late 1800s Montreal: Marie is the whimsical, adoring daughter of a sugar baron and Sadie is the darkly ambitious newcomer to the neighborhood. The girls soon connect and their relationship becomes all-consuming. They push boundaries and their games become violent.

After a tragedy, they are separated for years across an ocean, each girl growing into her callousness and complementary power. When they reunite as adults, Marie has become a savvy & cutthroat business owner and Sadie is banished by her family to the gritty working class section of the city - which happens to be the perfect setting to finish her novel. A women-led revolution is beginning, with the brutalized factory workers ignited by a shared rage. And Marie and Sadie unexpectedly fall into each other’s arms once more.

It is quippy and villainously fun at times (a lot of lines felt like they were designed to be quoted with glee), but can definitely be challenging to go back and forth between two self-centered, callous, willfully ignorant main characters. Both Marie and Sadie wield their privilege like a shield. They exist in decadent ignorance and see others as sub-human. They’re barely willing to engage with their humanity, though they do lean into freedom & power through sex & desire. 

Everyone else is a puppet or a toy in their life - just things for them to exploit - but I was so drawn to these ‘lesser’ supporting characters. George, who is ever-questioning her gender identity and role in society (ugh we could have gone so much further here). Jean-Pauline Marat, who runs a slightly-nefarious drugstore. Even the manipulatively righteous Mary. 

I enjoyed spotting the recurring motifs and the imagery that accompanied them – the cracking of eggs as the girls matured and became further emboldened, Sadie & her cunning rats that refused to be vanquished, black cats challenging luck, lust and female power as madness and grotesqueness, and so on.

An overarching theme here is the exploration of the intersection of class and feminism. It was very white - to be honest I don’t think this book could have adequately confronted race - but race was a notably absent theme and experience within the revolution presented. 

The writing was very stilted (every sentence was the exact same length & ended in a period) - it had to be an intentional stylistic choice, but it could become grating to read at times.

Additionally, the themes and takeaways were extremely heavy-handed. We as readers weren’t given the opportunity to explore the subtext or the ripple effects of characters’ actions, because it was very deliberately told to us in the very next sentence. 

But this was a dark, tantalizing read. 

(Oh, and each character is plucked from the French Revolution in this retelling of sorts. But I can’t imagine you need me to point that out. It’s also a retelling of ​​the poem The Goblin Market.)

CW: murder, death, rape & sexual assault, abortion, animal cruelty & death, classism, sexism, suicide, gun violence, pedophilia, homophobia, domestic abuse, infidelity, sexual content

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