I did not get to this one in time, but I have heard of it from other booktubers and it sounds good, so I'll find it when I can in the wild to review it properly.

This was one of the strangest books I have read this year. It had a creeping sense of tension throughout the book, with a very mysterious and anticlimactic ending. I assumed this book would be more scary or upsetting, what with the horror tag, but in the end it was mostly just sad and reflective. I think it was an excellent view of what a non-apocalyptic cult looks like and how confusing those types of situations can be. It was also a great depiction of the kind of loss, relief, and confusion the death of a difficult family member can bring. Overall good but confusing as to genre and tone.

I loved the concept of this novel, but found that it was a little slow for my taste. I love cult-horror and religious horror because there’s something authentic about it that some other genres don’t necessarily have. I thought the characters were great and that the conflict was exciting, but it wasn’t enough to get me fully hooked into the book.

I feel like this one wasn't for me. It took a bit to really get through. There was just a lot going on that made it hard to keep track of and so for that reason I did not find myself wanting to pick it up and finish. I did DNF about 75% in.

A journalist investigates a seductive and mysterious cult and its leader, an enigmatic Vietnam War veteran, in this not-to-be-missed novel.

O Sinners!
By Nicole Cuffy

This book seems to have a lot of potential. Faruq, a young Muslim journalist, is trying to embed himself in a cult called the nameless, situated in the redwoods of California and led by a Vietnam vet named Odo. The cult and its leader are very mysterious –but they seem to be attracting followers with large pocketbooks willing to give all the money up to the cause.

But back up here. First we have Faruq, somewhat of a stereotypical young muslim, who, with the recent death of his strict father, has found himself grieving and yet freed from his religion. This is kind of hackneyed but okay.

Now who have a cult leader suffering from war flashbacks, which are confusing. Also thrown into the mix, are what purports to be social media conversations and posts.

Put all this together and I confess to being lost. I found myself not able to follow the story as it wanders off in so many directions. I soon lost interest in even trying.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for this ARC.

A deep in a cult story. We have the Nameless, which gives the cult a very haunting vibe and religion seems to be in quite the backbone of it all. Faruq questions it all- looking for why the love for the leader, the devotion, best of all who the checks are really written to. So skepticism is our main characters point of view and really seeing in the beginning what cults really are.

This is looking at a cult with a very impressive roster- like celebrities, politicians- but looking at it from more of a journalistic point of view. We are also getting a view of a different timeline- Vietnam 1969- and takes some time to really connect the two. Especially for a story that was a slow progression. If the description hadn’t explained what the point of the additional timelines and script were, I wouldn’t have caught on, as it wasn’t integrated as seamlessly. If you like to view a cult like culture from a documentary view, this gives those vibes.

I enjoyed the Faruq point of view with Odo conversations for the most part and the other narratives grew more engaging as the story progressed- however every-time we changed to a different timeline/excerpt, I did feel more pulled out of the story. I did like the Vietnam flashback, with well written imagery. I did feel confused over what the story was trying to say- as it seems like it wants to be a plot story but was written more like a character story. From Odo and the members of the nameless, Faruq facing his own demons, reflecting as he could easily be one of the nameless, to the individuals part of his platoon; the characters were stronger compared to the plot, or lack there of.
With the character focus, as a reader the story gives a more humanizing experience of a cult, like the way it reflects on its leader Odo. Odo was just never charismatic enough for me to fall for. But maybe that’s my skepticism in and of itself. The ending is open ended, leaving the reader in the thoughts of their own journey.

This one should have been a knockout for me. The premise is rich and layered: grief, cults, identity, legacy. And Nicole Cuffy’s writing is undeniably elegant and thoughtful. There are stretches that feel like literary gold, especially when exploring the allure of belief and how trauma morphs into ideology.

But I’ll be honest: while I was intrigued by the dual timeline and the philosophical undercurrents, I never fully connected emotionally. Faruq’s descent into “the nameless” was compelling in theory, but the pacing dragged at points, and the flashbacks to Vietnam sometimes felt like a different book entirely. It was more cerebral than visceral for me, and I wanted to feel his unraveling more than I did.

Three totally different narratives are combined for a unique, if somewhat disjointed, experience. The primary narrative was genuinely engaging, and I do love a epistolary section-- the flashback to Vietnam was evocative, though it felt somewhat out of the universe of the rest of the novel. Would recommend for most people though.

Faruq Zaidi is a young journalist who investigates a cult called "the nameless." He embeds himself at their base in the California redwoods. The leader Odo is a Vietnam War veteran who received his 18 Utterances years ago while fighting for the U.S. The leader may be hiding something sinister, though. Can Faruq uncover the truth as he confronts his past? Or will he succumb to the nameless spell?
The novel is told in three threads - present in California, past in Vietnam and past in Texas where the nameless got into a fight with a fundamentalist evangelical church. That part of the book was easy to understand. The author does a great job at differentiating between timelines.
But that's the only praise I can give this book. I kept expecting the three threads to intertwine and make sense. They never did. That's the part of the book that I really don't appreciate. I'm all for realism, but I also want to understand the point of a book. And this one seems to have no point.
I finished this book in hopes of discovering a satisfactory ending, which never happened.

Very, very bloated - I wanted to enjoy this, but there are a lot of details and backstories that bring the pace to a crawl.

I was really looking forward to reading this book but it ended up being just okay.

In three main narratives, O Sinners! tells the story of a cult called The Nameless—its leader, its followers, and its enemies. For the most part, we follow Faruq Zaidi, a journalist and disaffected Muslim, as he enters the cult compound to write an exposé on its famed leader, Odo. As you may anticipate, the longer Faruq spends in the cult, the more he sympathizes with its adherents, particularly when it comes to their stoicism in grief. As Faruq works to process the passing of his father, he comes to understand what his own life's work is meant to be.

The cult in this book was so generic as to be forgettable. It was like a vague culmination of every cult you've ever heard of, minus any exciting evasions of the law—charismatic leader, devoted followers, free-love compound in the West. The other two narratives don't add much to the plot either. We follow a band of Black infantrymen drafted into the Vietnam War and then a documentary screenplay outlining the cult's run-in with a group of evangelicals in Texas. If these perspectives had neatly tied together in the end, or if there were a punchier finale than "we all have to deal with death", then it might have been worth the slog. But ultimately, I didn't think there was much to feel or learn from this and don't necessarily recommend it.

I find the way that people fall into cult mentalities so interesting. I read this book very quickly, because I was so intrigued by the plot. I enjoyed the back and forth in the story of the narrator's family, the Viet Nam War, and the compound. Many thoughtful questions were raised in the book. Unfortunately, the book ended to no answers to any of the mysteries or the questions that were posed. I read it, but it is among the most disappointing I have ever read. I could not recommend this title to anyone.

I could not stop reading this book! The plot was so compelling and the characters were so mysterious! It was suspenseful and thou9ht provoking. Ultimately, it's one of those books where not that much happens, but everything happens, ya know?

Nicole Cuffy’s O Sinners! explores themes of faith, race, family, and history—topics that never fail to draw me into a novel. The story follows Faruq, a Muslim-American journalist who is still mourning the recent death of his father when he embarks on a new assignment: a story about The Nameless, a cultish community in the Northern California redwoods that rejects mainstream society and its “distortions” and seeks to fill the world with “beauty” and “joy,” most popularly in the form of trendy, hashtag-laden Instagram posts. The Nameless’s leader is Odo, a shadowy but charismatic figure whose time as a young soldier during the Vietnam War has left him critical of the American imperial project and imbued with the kind of pithy “utterances” that his followers take as wisdom. Cutting back and forth in time and perspective—from Faruq, to Odo’s years in Vietnam, to the script for a documentary film about The Nameless’s legal battle against a fundamentalist Christian church in Texas—O Sinners! ultimately asks the question: What’s the difference between a cult and a religion?
…
I was hooked by the novel’s central question and by the author’s refusal to offer easy answers to it. In Cuffy’s hands, The Nameless aren’t transparently evil; they’re not financially exploitative like Scientology, nor apocalyptic like Heaven’s Gate, nor bigotedly violent like the Westboro Baptist Church. I kept waiting for a dramatic revelation about Odo or The Nameless, one that would squarely and roundly condemn them as a dangerous, shadowy, evil cult—a revelation that would’ve confirmed my preconceived ideas about this group and its leader. Cuffy’s much too sophisticated for that. She weaves together various threads—The Namless’s utopianism, the angry evangelical vigor of the Texas megachurch, Faruq’s own lapsed Muslim faith, and his memories of his father’s determined devotion—to show the messiness and complexity of all religious conviction, the exchanges and compromises that all people make in their quest to find some ultimate meaning in life. While not everything in this book worked for me, and while I found the pacing of the story unnecessarily slow, O Sinners! was nevertheless an unexpected treat in my 2025 reading life thus far.

Faruq Zaidi, a Pakistani-American journalist mourning the recent loss of his father, a devout Muslim. He is given an assignment for the journal he works for. It is to write an investigative feature about a cult called the “nameless” which quickly turns personal. The world of “the nameless is a California-based cult led by Odo, a Vietnam War veteran turned spiritual leader. The Nameless live by the 18 Utterances, doctrines both mystical and seductive. He goes deeper into the movement, staying first with the San Francisco devotees Clover and Aeschylus and eventually enters the cult’s Forbidden City in the redwoods, the line between observer and participant begins to blur. Will he become a member of the cult?

The author has written about Odo’s past in Vietnamese. He also includes Nero from a documentary which the cult gives a chilling, meta-narrative commentary. These two threads are parallel to Faruq’s narrative. The themes of the book include identity, faith and the cost of belonging. The book is fiction yet at the same time as I read it “felt” like nonfiction. I didn’t expect this book to be about faith and doubt.

I don't know if I ultimately understood exactly what Cuffy was trying to say in this book, but I did find most of it fascinating. The questions of belief and the line between religion and cult, fanaticism and devotion, were interesting and parsed out well.

But the characters, despite our spending so much time with them, never felt fully realized to me. Odo is a blank page, and even with the flashbacks to his time in Vietnam, it never felt like we got to know anything about him. He answers questions with questions, platitudes with platitudes, to the point that he often seemed to be speaking nonsense; where was the charisma that his followers saw in him?

I never fully connected to this book. There was little warmth here, which would have helped make these characters feel more real, more natural. Instead it felt like they began life as a creative writing prompt in a well-to-do graduate program.. I much preferred Cuffy's last novel because there was connection there, emotion and feeling; that was lacking in her follow-up.

I was looking forward to reading this book because be all accounts it should have been right up my alley, but it was such a slog. The disjointed nature of alternating timelines coupled with the script interstitial really made it difficult for me to connect with the story. I wish the book just focused on the cult and an examination of the allure of belief. That would have been a big improvement. Although I found even those sections kind of infuriating because Odo is such a off-putting sanctimonious blow-hard that says nothing interesting or meaningful and yet we’re supposed to believe that Faruq is seduced by his preternatural insightfulness. I just couldn’t buy into this. This one was not my favorite.

This book caught my attention immediately by the description after having no past knowledge of the book or author. I was drawn to the plot (we love a cult story) and was very pleased with the writing style and cadence of the book. I'll 100% seek out more by Nicole in the future.

O Sinners! is a compelling novel that delves deep into the complexities of faith, trauma, and personal identity. Nicole Cuffy weaves a rich narrative that explores the impact of cults and the struggles of reconciling past wounds, including haunting Vietnam War flashbacks, which add emotional depth to the story.

The characters feel real and flawed, and the exploration of difficult themes is handled with sensitivity and nuance. While the pacing occasionally slows, the overall story is gripping and thought-provoking, offering plenty to reflect on long after the last page.

This book is a strong choice for readers who appreciate stories that challenge perspectives and explore the darker corners of human experience with empathy.