I felt drawn to this book by The Universe. (Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Sloane Crowley, and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my review.) It felt like it was for a younger, hipper audience than me, but you may find that it blows your mind. Overall, this was decent, but I think it just wasn’t for me, thus the three-star rating. Written in a surrealist manner, this book flips you around and leaves you wondering what all of this is for … and you get your answer, with a very abrupt ending. Seeing her past relationships gets her wondering why she hated some of them, why she liked some of them, and why she ended it with all of them. Lola is engaged now, but she’s not sure if the man is really the one for her, or if it’s just a relationship of convenience. She eventually realizes that she’s meeting all of these exes for a reason: to get closure. Don’t call it a cult! It’s kind of a cult.

Soon, she realizes this isn’t fate, it isn’t destiny - it was all a plan set up by her friend Clive, who has seemingly started a cult. Lola is a young hipster in Manhattan, and she has a never-ending string of ex-boyfriends that she keeps running into. I enjoyed the writing style, but I also found it a bit young and pretentious. I thought the plot was cool, but I also thought there wasn’t much of a plot. Is it possible to have a happy ending in an age when the past is ever at your fingertips and sanity is for sale? With her gimlet eye, Sloane Crosley spins a wry literary fantasy that is equal parts page-turner and poignant portrayal of alienation. Memories of the past swirl and converge in ways both comic and eerie, as Lola is forced to decide if she will surrender herself to the conspiring of one very contemporary cult. What would normally pass for coincidence becomes something far stranger as the recently engaged Lola must contend not only with the viability of her current relationship but with the fact that both her best friend and her former boss, a magazine editor turned mystical guru, might have an unhealthy investment in the outcome. Nothing is quite what it seems as the city becomes awash with ghosts of heartbreaks past.

On her way back, she runs into a former boyfriend. One night in New York City’s Chinatown, a woman is at a work reunion dinner with former colleagues when she excuses herself to buy a pack of cigarettes. Hilariously insightful and delightfully suspenseful, Cult Classic is an original: a masterfully crafted tale of love, memory, morality, and mind control, as well as a fresh foray into the philosophy of romance.

Look alive out there sloane crosley