Up until meeting her now-fiancé Maxwell (affectionally called Boots), Lola was the definition of a serial monogamist. Unlucky in love – or maybe too lucky but with the wrong people – Lola has a storied past full of men who did her wrong, men she did wrong, and men she simply grew apart from. But all that’s over, now that she and Boots are engaged. Except Lola isn’t quite sure she wants to be engaged. The ring is kind of ugly, she doesn’t really like any of Boots’ friends, and she can’t help but think that maybe there’s something missing. While out to dinner with old friends, Lola bumps into an ex-boyfriend. They grab a drink, catch up a bit, and go their separate ways. Which she would chalk up to coincidence, except it happens again the next night, with a different ex-boyfriend. And then she sees another while out running errands, and is really starting to freak out.
That’s when she discovers that her former mentor and her best friend are both part of a group – not a cult, they insist – that believes they can influence the subconscious through targeted meditation and even more targeted social media manipulation. This New Age-y group offers a variety of services designed to help people find closure by subliminally influencing people and causing exes to “coincidentally” bump into each other. And Lola is their first test case. For the next few weeks she’ll bump into every ex who still occasionally thinks of her, and maybe she’ll be able to get some closure on those old relationships. But living too much in the past isn’t good for one’s psyche, and Lola can’t help but feel that the group is hiding something from her, possibly in the meditation room that she’s never been allowed to see…
The book is ok. Lola can be funny, but she is a terrible communicator for someone who works in publishing. Half her relationships fail because she just won’t talk to her boyfriend properly. She’s questioning her relationship with Boots but won’t talk about it with him. It’s like, girl, you can’t fix a problem if the other party doesn’t know there is one! Then there’s the sameness of the dialogue. I read this as an audiobook, so maybe the written version is better, but the dialogue all felt like it was being said by the same person. Like, the main characters all sounded the same, but not in the way that friends can talk like each other, but like the author didn’t do a great job of giving her characters unique voices. And – SPOILER ALERT – the final reveal was freakin’ psychotic. And yet it all gets wrapped up with a neat little bow. I don’t know, I think there can be value in re-evaluating past relationships and thinking how you could have improved them, but this was a lot.