I was told there'd be cake is one of my all time favorite books. I had hoped this one would be like that. I was somewhat disappointed.

Gosh, Cult Classic - this one brings up mixed emotions for me! Through the first half of the book, I couldn't put it down and thought it could be one of my favorite books of the year. But then it took a turn and was a bit more extreme than expected. It was still a great read, but not what I expected at all.

Cult Classic
by Sloane Crosley
Genre: Lit Fiction
Pub Date: 7 July 2022


𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐞: One night in New York City’s Chinatown, a woman runs into a former boyfriend. And then another. And . . . another. As the city becomes awash with ghosts of heartbreaks past, she must find a way to make peace with herself and her collection of relationships.

Review: I love Sloane Crosley’s essay collections, so I was absolutely intrigued by this novel from the jump, and its glorious cover. Sloane has a way of reducing her environment and her subjects to their purest, sometimes most cynical but also most intimate components and for that I have a deep appreciation. She is an excellent story teller and, because this has a whole cult mystique quasi-thriller/mystery element to it, it definitely holds one’s attention. And, for me, the beauty of her writing is in moments of her narrator’s sneaky, profound, and seemingly accidentally insightful comments on love and relationships. I just ate this one up. She narrates the audiobook, which I thought was well done and listened in combination with reading on my commutes/hot girl walks. A solid 4/5 star read.

Read if you:
🏡Are a New Yorker
🏡Ever dated someone you can’t forget
🏡Have a fascination w psychology/cults
🏡Need closure

Thank you to @macmillanaudio & @fsgbooks / @mcdbooks for the ALC & e-galley in exchange for an honest review.

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I enjoyed the concept of Cult Classic, but I could see the twist from a mile away. It was a fun read, but not a re-read for me.

4.25 stars! “Romance may be the world’s oldest cult.”

This was such a fun, witty, and modern portrayal of dating today! I fell right in step with the writing and style of the book. I love a NYC setting and loved the line it edged on being a little bit cultish and having magical realism integrated into the plot.

This is more character-driven and literary, and gave me similar vibes to Ghosts of Girlfriends past! This one might not be for everyone, but it really worked for me and gave me something to think about.

This feels like a clever love letter to millennials, and I think the humor and sarcasm landed just right!

This was such a strange book with an interesting and unique concept. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. The writing was incredible, the plot was so much fun. This book was weird, off-the-wall, witty, and somehow even emotional?! I’m having a hard time coming up with thoughts on this book, but just know that I absolutely loved the fun and absurdity of it all. Like a modern day A Christmas Carol except less… crotchety and more cult-like. So great!

Lola is a 37-year-old woman whose world is rocked when she runs into one of her big exes. Then, she runs into another one. Soon enough, she finds that her former colleagues have started an entrepreneurial “cult” which she is test subject for. With the hopes of confronting her past for closure, Lola finds herself on an existential journey through her past by way of the present.

This book is such an interesting premise. It has so many great moments. By the middle-end, I found my interest waning. I grew to dislike and be frustrated by the character I had first found interesting.

I do think it would make an excellent series or movie. It just needs a little clean-up.

I enjoyed this dystopian modern romance. It's very "New York" and the main character feels a bit 'the New Me'/MYORR but in a way that lends itself to the plot.

*advance copy from Netgalley*

Cleverly written take on the running into your ex trope. In Chinatown, the main character runs into her ex boyfriend and becoming more than an run in, the night takes a strange turn. Witty and fun. I found myself cackling at times.

Sloane Crosley's appealingly oddball tale explores the specter of newly engaged Lola's past loves and lusts while playing with space and time in New York City's Chinatown.

In Sloane Crosley's Cult Classic, Lola is leaving dinner with former colleagues one night in New York City’s Chinatown when she runs into a former boyfriend. And then she runs into another. And another. It seems that each day, a blast from the past emerges within the same few blocks--whether they were important to her or in her life for only a short time.

The city is soon awash with ghosts of Lola's brief encounters, big loves, strange connections, and heartbreaks from the past.

“This is New York," I explained. "Everything is outside everyone’s comfort zone.”

The scenario is particularly fraught for someone like Lola, who can't let go of the past, who has meticulously saved every memento from every man in her life, who constantly questions whether she has it in her to remain committed to one person--and who doubts whether she should remain engaged to her fiancé.

Romance may be the world’s oldest cult. It hooks you when you’re vulnerable, scares the shit out of you, holds your deepest fears as collateral, renames you something like "baby," brainwashes you, then makes you think that your soul will wither and die if you let go of a person who loved you.

Nothing in this entertaining, oddball tale is quite what it seems. Cult Classic is a sometimes darkly funny, suspenseful story of love, memory, and mind control with a twist—and then a double twist. Characters explore connections, loyalties, disappointments, evolutions, and revelations. The story went roughly where I thought it might, but I didn't anticipate the quirky details or the unexpected route there.

Sloane Crosley is also the author of I Was Told There’d Be Cake, The Clasp, Look Alive Out There, and How Did You Get This Number.

If you like books that play with time, you might also enjoy the books on the Greedy Reading Lists Six Riveting Time-Travel Stories to Explore and Six Second-Chance, Do-Over, Reliving-Life Stories.

I received an electronic prepublication copy of this book courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, MCD and NetGalley.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for allowing me to read Cult Classic by Sloane Crosley.

I have never read anything by Sloane Crosley before and I really enjoyed this book! I enjoyed the idea of confronting past relationships and being able to get closure in a modern dating world that doesn't always allow that to happen. This book is witty and an easy read, with some areas being a bit long drawn.

I will have to read more books by Sloane Crosley!

If you’re Canadian, you know that people from Toronto can be annoying — particularly since they seem to feel as though they are the literal centre of the universe, or at least the centre of the universe for all things Canadian. I’d imagine that for most people coming from New York City this is magnified 10 million times — certain New Yorkers, particularly ones who have a career in the media, feel that they’re somehow chicer, more superior, and trendier than anyone else on the planet. I don’t want to sound mean here, and you can draw your own conclusion from this admission of fact: with Cult Classic, you’re getting a book from an NYC writer who contributes to highly regarded publications such as The New York Times and Vanity Fair with some regularity. The title does have meaning to the text, but readers would be forgiven if they thought this was the sort of thing that someone too clever thought would earn them some clickbait on the bookstore shelf. I’m not trying to be churlish here, either, but Cult Classic is an exhausting novel that feels self-important. It’s the kind of book that someone from New York City, and particularly someone who is involved with the New York City media circus, would write. It’s like Sex and the City (without the female entourage) meets A Christmas Carol. Meaning that it wants to have its cake and eat it, too: be somewhat trendy but be in print a couple of centuries from now. Few books of this type exist in history, to my knowledge, so as an author you might have to pick one of those options, you know?

Cult Classic is a novel about a New Yorker in her late 30s named Lola. (And, yes, there’s a reference to the Kinks song in the book.) She is about to get married to a man she has nicknamed Boots. (Shades of Mr. Big?) However, during a dinner out at a trendy restaurant in Manhattan’s Chinatown with former colleagues from her days running a magazine, she darts out for a cigarette and runs into an ex-boyfriend. A day or so later, she runs into another —and, soon, it’s as though she keeps bumping into ghosts of Christmases Past! It turns out that Lola has an awful lot of exes, and she is getting a chance at closure by meeting them all one-by-one one last time before she marries. However, the exes are showing up via a sort of cult (but I’m not sure exactly if that’s what it is) run by her former boss that is using Lola as a guinea pig for a sci-fi-esque project that I didn’t really understand. I’m not even going to try to explain this part of the book, for it made absolutely no sense. The book would have been better (though possibly just as farfetched) if these encounters were strictly predicated on chance. I mean, the reason it would be hard to believe would be because New York is a city of, what? eight million people? What would the chances be of meeting past lovers, right, especially if some of them had moved to other states or were now living in other countries? So, yes, the author had to invent a scientific reason for these encounters that just doesn’t work.

In any event, I don’t want to seem as though I’m shooting this book down because it is written by a hipster-ish New York City woman and is seemingly aimed at other hipsters. There are things about the novel that I liked. For one, it does have a sense of humour as much as it feels conceited, for author Sloane Crosley drops forth the occasional pun and double entendre that may make the reader chuckle with delight. And I suppose the novel is relatable for me even as a man: like Lola, I used to have a collection of letters from exes — in my case, under my bed — that a now ex-common law spouse (in the eyes of the Canada Revenue Agency) made me throw out. However, that’s about all I can say that’s decent about this title. I hope I’m being fair and balanced here, but do we need another book about a nearly middle-aged woman who will never have to worry about how she will pay the rent due to plum bylines she keeps on getting opining about first-world problems in people’s love lives?

I don’t want to say that I hated this book — it wasn’t the worst book I’ve read— but I found parts of it to be boring. And the reason for that keeps coming back to the fact that the main characters are smug and self-centered and are a chore to be entertained by. I found it hard to be enamoured with a book that makes the reader think about past relationships that didn’t work out without acknowledging they may have had something to do with the main character being involved in a profession where late hours are a given. (For instance, it never crosses Lola’s mind at any point in this book that maybe her previous romances failed because she simply wasn’t giving enough time to them. Because, if you’re working as an editor at a magazine, you’re going to be working a lot of late nights — which is why many journalism-y people retire at 30 to start families and, you know, have a taste of a seemingly normal life.) In any event, Cult Classic is not billed as advertised — and by that, I mean it will probably never be one or more than that. With characters as vain as this and a plot that just defies logic, even a twist of an ending can’t save this one from the doldrums. Readers deserve better than this narcissistic taste of seemingly important people living in a city that the world tends to revolve around. You really do. That’s all I can say.

The writing in this book is hypnotic. Sloane Crosley has mastered the craft of choosing the perfect word and the creating original metaphors. I thoroughly enjoyed the writing and found myself wanting more. The writing at the sentence level kept me interested,
I did not enjoy the plot of this book and felt it was silly and slightly immature compared to the writing. The two did not match. I realize that some of the writer's previous works are humorous and so maybe some lightness in the absurdity of this novel was intended. I just don't think it was nailed. It read like an attempt (yes, attempt) to create a Jennifer Egan-esque romance novel.
While the sense of place is very strong in the novel, the setting descriptions often felt confusing and unclear.

I wish the mastery of craft at the sentence level carried over to the mastery of plot and story. The writing saved this book and made me want to read more of the writer's works. If I had to pick between a well-written story with a bad plot and a poorly-written story with a good plot, I would probably choose the well-written story. The four stars are purely for the descriptive writing.

“Romance may be the world’s oldest cult. It hooks you when you’re vulnerable, scares the shit out of you, hold your deepest fears as collateral, renames you something like ‘baby,’ brainwashes you, then makes you think that your soul will wither and die if you let go of a person who loved you."

I was drawn into this book by the cover, and I feel like it came to me at just the right time. I'm not sure how I haven't read anything by Sloane Crosley before, but this will certainly not be the last thing I read by her.

Lola is recently engaged and feeling a little bit lost in her life. She is questioning some of her choices, not the least of which is her relationship to her fiancé "Boots". During a dinner with some of her former coworkers, she runs into an ex-boyfriend, forcing her to re-evaluate the reasons why they broke up. The next day, she runs into another ex. And then another. And another...

What follows is an interesting (and hilarious) look at modern relationships, enclosed in a love letter to life in New York City. Lola is cynical, at times annoyingly so, but I loved the journey she goes on as she comes to terms with her past and present love life. Though this may sound like a Romance-focused Groundhog day, it goes deeper than this and takes twists that I didn't see coming. There's a quasi-cult, as the title suggests (no spoilers, I promise!), which is always a plus for me in books.

In short, I devoured this book and loved the journey of reading it. Bonus points for the audiobook, which is read by the author and really brings out the humor of Lola's story. If you're looking for a fun, summer lit-fic read, this is definitely one to check out!

Smart, funny, and nearly scary enough to be believable. This is the story of when tech, social media, and bug data combine to interfere with one’s love life.

I was introduced to Sloane Crosley’s writing through her wry and witty essay collection, “I Was Told There'd Be Cake”, a Thurber Prize finalist.

In Crosley’s “Cult Classic”, the reader follows protagonist Lola, a soon-to-be-married New Yorker, who has concerns about her fiancé, and seems to be searching for a particularly elusive kind of love. Bizarrely, a high-concept cult arranges a series of seemingly chance run-ins with her ex-boyfriends and she is forced to confront them on the streets of Chinatown.

Lola is notorious among her friends for having a romantically haunted past. She’s dated many men, and has had, perhaps, 15 five-month relationships.

Clive, her former boss at a magazine called “Modern Psychology”, which is basically “Psychology Today”, has become a guru, and proves to be highly interested in how Lola is handling the doubts that keep popping up about her relationship.

“Cult Classic” is a romantic comedy and mystery set in a new age mind control cult, which works from an abandoned synagogue on the Lower East Side. “Cult Classic” is clever, surreal and inventive. It is about love. It is about memory. It is about New York.

A huge thank you to @NetGalley and @fsgbooks for the advanced e-galley.

I had never heard of Sloane Crosley before reading this book, so I went in without any expectations as to what this book would be. I was incredibly pleased! This book is smart but not pretentious. Crosley is a funny writer and her main character, Lola, is messy, hilarious, and easy to like. Every time I thought I knew where the story was going, I would be wrong. Crosley manages to strike the balance of a surprising plot twist that doesn’t feel out of the blue.

I did feel that the main story took longer than necessary to get started—I tend to like the action to start right away. If Lola herself wasn’t as fun as she is, I might have DNFed the book.

I am having a hard time deciding if I liked this book or not. Some of the prose was long winded and too abstract. Maybe if I had read this book when I was younger and single I would have connected more with the idea of visiting past relationships. Unlike Lola, I also don't think having a past is an unthinkable thing we must not talk about, I think it creates the person we are today. I also felt like sometimes the chapters were too long and I nodded off several times during longer sections.

I like the idea of the story though, and I particularly liked the end. I think the whole thing could have been done "better" though.

The book had an unusual plot. I enjoyed watching the relationships and story unfold. I related to the main character a bit as I used to hold on to the memories of relationships. I will recommend this to those interested in humor and literary fiction.

Feels dated in a way I didn't like. The criticism about wellness culture was neither interesting nor cutting. The protagonist's central dilemma (does she want to marry her nice-enough fiancé) isn't unique and lacks the definition to make the plot have forward momentum. All of Lola's exes were some form of cliché. Crosley is a maverick at observation, and the book is at its best when she's remarking on wacky elements of mundane life.