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Lonely Crowds: A Novel
Luster meets The Idiot in this riveting debut novel about a volatile friendship between two outsiders who escape their bleak childhoods and enter the glamorous early '90s art world in New York City, where only one of them can make it.
Ruth, an only child of recent immigrants to New England, lives in an emotionally cold home and attends the local Catholic girl’s school on a scholarship. Maria, a beautiful orphan whose Panamanian mother dies by suicide and is taken care of by an ill, unloving aunt, is one of the only other students attending the school on a scholarship. Ruth is drawn forcefully into Maria’s orbit, and they fall into an easy, yet intense, friendship. Her devotion to her charming and bright new friend opens up her previously sheltered world.
While Maria, charismatic and aware of her ability to influence others, eases into her full self, embracing her sexuality and her desire to be an artist, Ruth is mostly content to follow her to college and then into the early-nineties art world of New York City. There, ambition and competition threaten to rupture their friendship, while strong and unspoken forces pull them together over the years. Whereas Maria finds early success in New York City as an artist, Ruth stumbles along the fringes of the art world, pulled toward a quieter life of work and marriage. As their lives converge and diverge, they meet in one final and fateful confrontation.
Ruth and Maria's decades-long friendship interrogates the nature of intimacy, desire, class and time. What does it mean to be an artist and to be true to oneself? What does it mean to give up on an obsession? Marking the arrival of a sensational new literary talent, Lonely Crowds challenges us to reckon honestly with our own ambitions and the lives we hope to lead.
Ruth, an only child of recent immigrants to New England, lives in an emotionally cold home and attends the local Catholic girl’s school on a scholarship. Maria, a beautiful orphan whose Panamanian mother dies by suicide and is taken care of by an ill, unloving aunt, is one of the only other students attending the school on a scholarship. Ruth is drawn forcefully into Maria’s orbit, and they fall into an easy, yet intense, friendship. Her devotion to her charming and bright new friend opens up her previously sheltered world.
While Maria, charismatic and aware of her ability to influence others, eases into her full self, embracing her sexuality and her desire to be an artist, Ruth is mostly content to follow her to college and then into the early-nineties art world of New York City. There, ambition and competition threaten to rupture their friendship, while strong and unspoken forces pull them together over the years. Whereas Maria finds early success in New York City as an artist, Ruth stumbles along the fringes of the art world, pulled toward a quieter life of work and marriage. As their lives converge and diverge, they meet in one final and fateful confrontation.
Ruth and Maria's decades-long friendship interrogates the nature of intimacy, desire, class and time. What does it mean to be an artist and to be true to oneself? What does it mean to give up on an obsession? Marking the arrival of a sensational new literary talent, Lonely Crowds challenges us to reckon honestly with our own ambitions and the lives we hope to lead.
297 pages, Kindle Edition
First published July 29, 2025
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24835 people want to read
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September 19, 2025
apparently stephanie wambugu has been subtweeting about bad reviews, so stephanie, if you're reading this: hiiiiii 🤸♀️
lonely crowds marks yet another submission into the growing “literary fiction” subgenre i call domestic dread: novels about women who meet the ennui of their (often aspirationally cosmopolitan) lives with destructive treatment of sex/relationships, substances, & work.
wambugu’s novel is sold as an analogue of elif batuman’s the idiot, a comp title that now seems totally random (both are set in the 90s…the similarities end there), as well as raven leilani’s luster. of the latter, there are at least parallels: young black women artists in new york city are contemplating race, class, & sexuality in increasingly unwelcoming environments. beyond that baseline, i would argue the leilani comp is an unfortunate set-up. for fans of luster, you’ll find lonely crowds to be comparatively colorless (thank me for avoiding the obvious ‘lackluster’ pun here).
take, for example, the earliest description of painting in luster (the images attached are best viewed on desktop with this review fully open):
now the earliest description of sketching in lonely crowds:
there’s a notable craft disparity here. wambugu’s prose rarely transcends short, simple sentence constructions & nonspecific descriptions. see also: “I walked for however long…” “...once you were done folding however many cranes…” “...he had just come back from a city I can’t remember the name of…” “I didn’t follow what he said when I asked him about the novel he was writing.”
this kind of prose reads like a parody of itself. to beginner writers, this may come as a shock but including seemingly extraneous details in your narrative will actually strengthen it. the easiest way to make your novel memorable is by injecting it with specificity. on the unlikely occasion we see something longer and more complex from wambugu, the syntax choices more often confuse than impress.
brightly lit, quickly, silently, suddenly, apparently—a few of the adverbs we see repeated multiple times within the same chapter, sometimes the same paragraph, as if wambugu’s descriptive well has already run dry. stylistic inconsistencies like these are minor copy errors that should’ve been ironed out by agents, interns, and/or editors (often all 3 are making passes through a manuscript prior to release). at one point, a character’s face is described as “jaunt and angular."
“The first time I wrote a substantial, longer piece of fiction was the novella I wrote for my [undergrad] thesis at Bard,” wambugu says in an interview, a fact i find altogether unsurprising. i don’t mean to suggest we’re doomed to mediocrity if we arrive at a skill later in life. i mean writing degrees from bard + columbia do not a novelist make. on the sentence level, wambugu’s skills are woefully inadequate, more reminiscent of a first-time writer than an MFA graduate (whatever that’s ‘meant’ to translate to in skill).
leilani, by contrast, is an obsessive disciple of syntax, (self-admittedly) slow to produce finished drafts but all the more striking for it. gary lutz describes this kind of writer in his essay “the sentence is a lonely place”—books, he writes, "in which virtually every sentence had the force and feel of a climax, in which almost every sentence was a vivid extremity of language, an abruption, a definitive inquietude. These were books written by writers who recognized the sentence as the one true theater of endeavor, as the place where writing comes to a point and attains its ultimacy."
this is not a recognition shared by wambugu.
in luster, leilani’s protagonist, a painter, delivers art-related soliloquies like this one:
the above is a passage that demonstrates an intimate understanding of intertextuality and ekphrasis. in lonely crowds, we get this: “There was a lot of Black art hanging on Ed’s walls.” okay. what did the art look like? who was it made by? what movement did it belong to?
in novels where painting is focal, it’s not outrageous to expect descriptions of/research about the medium. once or twice, wambugu brings in a real artist, but her references are fleeting and offhand. this is particularly criminal to me because she decided to set her novel in 90s nyc, an era & city where some of the greatest visual artists lived + created. wambugu herself admits ruth’s “...painting isn’t described a great deal in the novel…”
at this point, i have to throw my hands up. you’re writing about a painter...but the novel doesn’t describe her painting…or real art history...and you the author took painting lessons as a kid, so the medium isn't even new to you...? okay.
i could make a case for why leilani & wambugu are writing at such different skill levels. leilani’s an nyc native while wambugu is a transplant; this might explain the imbalance in their renderings of the same city. leilani is also 8 years older & published a great deal of shorter work (fiction + poetry) prior to her novel (23 pieces, to be exact). while both writers attended nyc MFA programs, wambugu’s is more well-known for financial predation. columbia’s 2-year MFA is estimated to cost around $230k without financial aid; in other words, it’s not a fully funded program. people pay to play.
still, i’m less interested in pitting these 2 against each other—though the comp title necessitates unpacking—than i am in pointing out the nature of the nyc MFA circuit, particularly for young, bright-eyed transplants.
writers in these (yes, predatory) masters programs are incentivized to put out novels before the novels are ready to be put out. proximity to publishing professionals allows for immediate connections, & writers who don’t yet have a strong understanding of novel-writing secure agents before they’ve even graduated from their programs (as with wambugu). cost of living in nyc, coupled with student loan debt, make rushed but flashy publishing deals all the more alluring.
when your novel receives the marketing rollout of wambugu’s, you may not care about a lack of editorial oversight or a truncated publishing timeline. so long as your book sells, people will tell you it’s good, whether that's their true belief or not. brushing elbows & maintaining contact with future literary icons supplants criticism. here, it’s not about the story being told. it’s about the book as a physical object and one that opens critical doors in buzzy, accelerated literary careers.
to quote from idiomatic's good girl review: "it's meant to be carried in purses and held next to a drink at bars in certain neighborhoods in certain cities to signal certain things about the media class of the reader. it is a prop. i wish it was a book."
you could argue MFAs aren’t requirements for securing agents (i’d agree). but if you’ve already enrolled in one (& if you're paying any amount of money for it), it might just behoove you to finish out those workshop credits before you let an agent near your drafts. this is a personal grievance i have with the publishing industry & one i’ve made known in my reviews: commercialization doesn’t care about or prioritize cultivating voice/style over time. it cares about rapidly churning out work that will drive profit margins, whether the work is structurally sound or not. in this case, it’s not.
wambugu writes in an elliptical, dead-end monotone. "I was born in August and it was August," begins her first page. "Since it was my birthday, I blew out candles." here, the logical organization of her prose seems intentionally simplistic—since A, B and C follow. attempts are made at stylizing this frank, invisible prose, but they ultimately fail as the dead sentences pile up. they’re everywhere & they hang limply from the page:
• “Everything went as expected.”
• “Events accrued and it was hard to know what to make of them, beyond pictures.”
• “I had breasts and ideas.”
• (of bedsheets:) “They were like an endless dress shirt, crisp at every corner.” (fascinating!)
• “His medicine cabinet was lined with orange bottles. […] His fridge was full of food.” (this is meant to underscore class differences & does so in the most mind-numbing way possible.)
• “Maria had the thing of precocious children.” (the thing? do you mean…the personality? sensibility? habits of…?)
• “We saw an interesting-looking movie on the marquee and bought two tickets.”
• “Emily was there in a scary-looking dress.”
wambugu never pushes herself beyond this plain, conversational register. details fall between the cracks & vague descriptions flatten an already dull portrait of the past. here’s a beginner's lesson in language for us all: descriptors like “interesting-” or “scary-looking” tell us nothing specific about a movie or article of clothing. of all the adjectives available, these are among the laziest.
now, prose can be plain and still deeply intelligent (see: rooney and batuman). this is not that. i’ve taught fiction classes to 18-yr-olds with a better grasp of descriptive language than this:
wambugu repeatedly attempts to interrogate lofty concepts like ‘time’ and ‘desire,’ but her musings are trapped in this undeveloped space of factual remarks.
of birthdays, she writes: “There was this extreme pressure to feign happiness while at the same time you were forced to confront the passing of your life and what you had done or had not done up until that point.”
well yes! birthdays do force us to confront the passage of time + our place in it! 😃 am i wrong for calling this YA-level introspection?
it isn’t just style that fails. it’s also the organization of information. logistical errors abound: characters know each other’s names before they’re introduced; aunts appear ready to pick up nieces with no way of knowing their location; men are described as not hostile and hostile within the same page; love interests say they don’t want to be painters then describe themselves as “honest about being a painter” 2 pages later. these aren’t intentional choices made to highlight our hypocrisies. they’re mistakes no one caught. any editor worth their salt would’ve flagged them; that this is a novel from a big 5 publisher only makes this more egregious (where’s all the $ going? certainly not copy-editing).
the most glaring logistical error arrives in a later section of the novel, when ruth is a working adult. in her words, adderall has only just begun to be widely available. this piece of info acts as a historical anchor: it tells us this chapter is set around 1996. & yet, it’s noted that ruth has taken adderall for art history finals in college—which would’ve been years earlier. in her words, “College had been full of these [Adderall-addicted] types.” this temporal inconsistency is so blatant, i can’t believe it wasn’t caught.
it also brings me to my next point: there was no reason for this to be set in the 90s. if you’re going to sell your novel as "historical fiction" (if you’re going to name a specific era in press materials/back matter) there should be evidence of that era all over the narrative, beyond blink-and-you-miss-it references in dialogue to a dictatorship or dead president. during my reading, i highlighted every passage i felt acted as historical mooring. less than 20 throwaway references came up, most as superficial as Jeopardy! or the price of a buffet meal ($6.99).
in a city as culturally rich as nyc, i expect more than this from an era rife with sociopolitical upheaval, counter/subcultures galore, & rampant infrastructural change. according to wambugu, an advisor told her not to do any research while writing her novel with "the idea being you can fact check it later." girl, WHAT?
(it seems she took that advice and ran.)
wambugu’s 90s-era nyc amounts to cocaine snorted in apartment bathrooms during parties riddled with cliches (love interests jump out of bushes—yes, you heard that right—or materialize right in time to catch ruth in the act). unshockingly, the party sequences are among the novel’s most trite. if we'd never been given a specific decade, nothing about the novel or my reading experience would’ve changed.
according to wambugu, this choice was necessary to avoid having to write about the internet....but writing contemporary books doesn't mean you have to include the internet? plenty of living writers have this figured out. personally, i’m sick of books that wind the clock back without any care for the historical. you want your book to be timeless, so you’ve deprived it almost completely of any ties to reality? how self-interested to think the real-world precludes books from being read outside of their life cycle. do we not often read 20th cent. lit for the express purposes of experiencing its anachronisms? does this not enrich our reading experience?
wambugu has cited rhys & morrison as inspirations behind this notion of timelessness, which made me laugh. their work is utterly of its time. that’s part of why it’s so good. there’s no reason why we can’t strike a balance between the historical & the timeless.
too often, writers who have a fear of dating their work overcorrect to such a degree that the end result is a smooth, featureless landscape with no defining aesthetic mode. the aesthetic mode is, in fact, “no aesthetic mode.”
in lonely crowds, interesting emotional threads never germinate beyond quickly snapped time-lapse-style footnotes in the diaristic renderings of ruth’s life. eight times over the course of the novel, a character asks ruth if she’s okay/how she feels (often during moments preceding or following emotional tumult), and ruth answers to the effect of, “i’m fine/okay/happy.” the dialogue doesn’t get any more riveting than this.
(i’m serious. count how many times ruth responds to someone with “cool.” end scene.)
after a point, i have to wonder how her storytelling style hasn’t encouraged introspection beyond the wan, “i didn't know why i felt that way,” or, “i wasn’t sure what that meant or who i was.” ruth describes herself as temperate + adaptable—a recipe for a boring narrator. rarely does she rise up, act, push back, or deliver more than non-answers during conversation. she’s instantly obsessed with her friend & sometimes love interest maria, for reasons (beyond the obvious) that are never really made apparent by the narrative. we don’t even learn maria is afro-latina until her country of origin (panama) is belatedly & perfunctorily named. with prose as in-your-face as wambugu’s, i found this surprising, even more so given the novel’s attempts at examining art through the lens of race/cultural grifting (i say ‘attempts’ because that thread never coheres).
an example of the time-lapse narration:
a bus driver has just committed literal manslaughter in front of a group of religious children…and that info is conveyed in 3 sentences. no build up. no care for tension or pacing. no examination of the emotional/narrative fallout. we never hear about the driver again. this is a frequent occurrence. events are summarized, brushed past, then promptly forgotten about. the order in which info is delivered becomes so flippant and so delayed i can’t help but think wambugu was trying to retrospectively justify certain plot choices by beaming motives to us from the unpaved detritus of hasty manuscript rewrites.
ruth doesn’t want the life she lives when she’s a kid, when she’s 18, when she’s married. from beginning to end, she’s unhappy and never compelled to change it (when it does change, it’s thanks to maria). what’s more, maria is never likable at any point in this bildungsroman—she gives ruth no true reason to believe she’s loved, trusted, or respected. maria is hard to please, flighty, uncaring, manipulative, hostile, irresponsible, defensive. that’s fine if you counteract the negative with some scene-writing to demonstrate why ruth likes her in the first place. but we don’t get that, so the eventual “plot twist” isn’t a twist at all. we’re knocked over the head with it from the outset.
“do you ever think about your aunt?” ruth asks maria at one point, an aunt who served as the mentally unstable parental figure responsible for maria’s earliest suffering. but maria is either asleep or pretending to be. we never get an answer. in some of the final pages of the novel, we learn of the aunt’s fate: “By the way, Maria forgot to tell me, her aunt was dead: pills.” now let’s hear a little more from maria about that death. “[Maria] didn’t want to discuss it.”
……oh! 😃
we’re left to wonder if these characters think about anything beyond their immediate physical surroundings. this is a constant affective tendency in wambugu’s novel. big feelings are rarely if ever expressed and examined between characters. here’s one place where that actually worked for me:
from an immigrant mother socialized into a staunchly religious, repressed caretaker role, this response makes perfect sense. what’s more, it’s info delivered to us through dialogue. it’s isn’t summary. it’s scene-work. all of it culminates in a way that tells us a ton about this character.
but when this happens with everyone in the novel, you’re no longer characterizing people. you’re creating a book that refuses to unpack itself or its choices with any degree of intention, that relies on ambiguity and abrupt cut-offs to carry it across the finish line. this is proven by wambugu’s emma cline-esque ending—that i won’t spoil—one deeply emblematic of contemporary litfic: catastrophe is (cheaply) hinted at, then the book fades to black. readers are left with the burden of filling in the blanks and writers can pat themselves on the back for replicating the random, senseless tragedies of real life—real life sans closure.
wow. should we all clap?
lonely crowds is a profoundly unprofound novel, formally and stylistically elementary, stunning in its ability to squander dynamic emotional set-ups and one in a long line of MFA duds. whether anyone in the literary world is willing to voice a dissenting opinion—an opinion any less than glowing—remains to be seen.
lonely crowds marks yet another submission into the growing “literary fiction” subgenre i call domestic dread: novels about women who meet the ennui of their (often aspirationally cosmopolitan) lives with destructive treatment of sex/relationships, substances, & work.
wambugu’s novel is sold as an analogue of elif batuman’s the idiot, a comp title that now seems totally random (both are set in the 90s…the similarities end there), as well as raven leilani’s luster. of the latter, there are at least parallels: young black women artists in new york city are contemplating race, class, & sexuality in increasingly unwelcoming environments. beyond that baseline, i would argue the leilani comp is an unfortunate set-up. for fans of luster, you’ll find lonely crowds to be comparatively colorless (thank me for avoiding the obvious ‘lackluster’ pun here).
take, for example, the earliest description of painting in luster (the images attached are best viewed on desktop with this review fully open):
now the earliest description of sketching in lonely crowds:
there’s a notable craft disparity here. wambugu’s prose rarely transcends short, simple sentence constructions & nonspecific descriptions. see also: “I walked for however long…” “...once you were done folding however many cranes…” “...he had just come back from a city I can’t remember the name of…” “I didn’t follow what he said when I asked him about the novel he was writing.”
this kind of prose reads like a parody of itself. to beginner writers, this may come as a shock but including seemingly extraneous details in your narrative will actually strengthen it. the easiest way to make your novel memorable is by injecting it with specificity. on the unlikely occasion we see something longer and more complex from wambugu, the syntax choices more often confuse than impress.
brightly lit, quickly, silently, suddenly, apparently—a few of the adverbs we see repeated multiple times within the same chapter, sometimes the same paragraph, as if wambugu’s descriptive well has already run dry. stylistic inconsistencies like these are minor copy errors that should’ve been ironed out by agents, interns, and/or editors (often all 3 are making passes through a manuscript prior to release). at one point, a character’s face is described as “jaunt and angular."
“The first time I wrote a substantial, longer piece of fiction was the novella I wrote for my [undergrad] thesis at Bard,” wambugu says in an interview, a fact i find altogether unsurprising. i don’t mean to suggest we’re doomed to mediocrity if we arrive at a skill later in life. i mean writing degrees from bard + columbia do not a novelist make. on the sentence level, wambugu’s skills are woefully inadequate, more reminiscent of a first-time writer than an MFA graduate (whatever that’s ‘meant’ to translate to in skill).
leilani, by contrast, is an obsessive disciple of syntax, (self-admittedly) slow to produce finished drafts but all the more striking for it. gary lutz describes this kind of writer in his essay “the sentence is a lonely place”—books, he writes, "in which virtually every sentence had the force and feel of a climax, in which almost every sentence was a vivid extremity of language, an abruption, a definitive inquietude. These were books written by writers who recognized the sentence as the one true theater of endeavor, as the place where writing comes to a point and attains its ultimacy."
this is not a recognition shared by wambugu.
in luster, leilani’s protagonist, a painter, delivers art-related soliloquies like this one:
the above is a passage that demonstrates an intimate understanding of intertextuality and ekphrasis. in lonely crowds, we get this: “There was a lot of Black art hanging on Ed’s walls.” okay. what did the art look like? who was it made by? what movement did it belong to?
in novels where painting is focal, it’s not outrageous to expect descriptions of/research about the medium. once or twice, wambugu brings in a real artist, but her references are fleeting and offhand. this is particularly criminal to me because she decided to set her novel in 90s nyc, an era & city where some of the greatest visual artists lived + created. wambugu herself admits ruth’s “...painting isn’t described a great deal in the novel…”
at this point, i have to throw my hands up. you’re writing about a painter...but the novel doesn’t describe her painting…or real art history...and you the author took painting lessons as a kid, so the medium isn't even new to you...? okay.
i could make a case for why leilani & wambugu are writing at such different skill levels. leilani’s an nyc native while wambugu is a transplant; this might explain the imbalance in their renderings of the same city. leilani is also 8 years older & published a great deal of shorter work (fiction + poetry) prior to her novel (23 pieces, to be exact). while both writers attended nyc MFA programs, wambugu’s is more well-known for financial predation. columbia’s 2-year MFA is estimated to cost around $230k without financial aid; in other words, it’s not a fully funded program. people pay to play.
still, i’m less interested in pitting these 2 against each other—though the comp title necessitates unpacking—than i am in pointing out the nature of the nyc MFA circuit, particularly for young, bright-eyed transplants.
writers in these (yes, predatory) masters programs are incentivized to put out novels before the novels are ready to be put out. proximity to publishing professionals allows for immediate connections, & writers who don’t yet have a strong understanding of novel-writing secure agents before they’ve even graduated from their programs (as with wambugu). cost of living in nyc, coupled with student loan debt, make rushed but flashy publishing deals all the more alluring.
when your novel receives the marketing rollout of wambugu’s, you may not care about a lack of editorial oversight or a truncated publishing timeline. so long as your book sells, people will tell you it’s good, whether that's their true belief or not. brushing elbows & maintaining contact with future literary icons supplants criticism. here, it’s not about the story being told. it’s about the book as a physical object and one that opens critical doors in buzzy, accelerated literary careers.
to quote from idiomatic's good girl review: "it's meant to be carried in purses and held next to a drink at bars in certain neighborhoods in certain cities to signal certain things about the media class of the reader. it is a prop. i wish it was a book."
you could argue MFAs aren’t requirements for securing agents (i’d agree). but if you’ve already enrolled in one (& if you're paying any amount of money for it), it might just behoove you to finish out those workshop credits before you let an agent near your drafts. this is a personal grievance i have with the publishing industry & one i’ve made known in my reviews: commercialization doesn’t care about or prioritize cultivating voice/style over time. it cares about rapidly churning out work that will drive profit margins, whether the work is structurally sound or not. in this case, it’s not.
wambugu writes in an elliptical, dead-end monotone. "I was born in August and it was August," begins her first page. "Since it was my birthday, I blew out candles." here, the logical organization of her prose seems intentionally simplistic—since A, B and C follow. attempts are made at stylizing this frank, invisible prose, but they ultimately fail as the dead sentences pile up. they’re everywhere & they hang limply from the page:
• “Everything went as expected.”
• “Events accrued and it was hard to know what to make of them, beyond pictures.”
• “I had breasts and ideas.”
• (of bedsheets:) “They were like an endless dress shirt, crisp at every corner.” (fascinating!)
• “His medicine cabinet was lined with orange bottles. […] His fridge was full of food.” (this is meant to underscore class differences & does so in the most mind-numbing way possible.)
• “Maria had the thing of precocious children.” (the thing? do you mean…the personality? sensibility? habits of…?)
• “We saw an interesting-looking movie on the marquee and bought two tickets.”
• “Emily was there in a scary-looking dress.”
wambugu never pushes herself beyond this plain, conversational register. details fall between the cracks & vague descriptions flatten an already dull portrait of the past. here’s a beginner's lesson in language for us all: descriptors like “interesting-” or “scary-looking” tell us nothing specific about a movie or article of clothing. of all the adjectives available, these are among the laziest.
now, prose can be plain and still deeply intelligent (see: rooney and batuman). this is not that. i’ve taught fiction classes to 18-yr-olds with a better grasp of descriptive language than this:
wambugu repeatedly attempts to interrogate lofty concepts like ‘time’ and ‘desire,’ but her musings are trapped in this undeveloped space of factual remarks.
of birthdays, she writes: “There was this extreme pressure to feign happiness while at the same time you were forced to confront the passing of your life and what you had done or had not done up until that point.”
well yes! birthdays do force us to confront the passage of time + our place in it! 😃 am i wrong for calling this YA-level introspection?
it isn’t just style that fails. it’s also the organization of information. logistical errors abound: characters know each other’s names before they’re introduced; aunts appear ready to pick up nieces with no way of knowing their location; men are described as not hostile and hostile within the same page; love interests say they don’t want to be painters then describe themselves as “honest about being a painter” 2 pages later. these aren’t intentional choices made to highlight our hypocrisies. they’re mistakes no one caught. any editor worth their salt would’ve flagged them; that this is a novel from a big 5 publisher only makes this more egregious (where’s all the $ going? certainly not copy-editing).
the most glaring logistical error arrives in a later section of the novel, when ruth is a working adult. in her words, adderall has only just begun to be widely available. this piece of info acts as a historical anchor: it tells us this chapter is set around 1996. & yet, it’s noted that ruth has taken adderall for art history finals in college—which would’ve been years earlier. in her words, “College had been full of these [Adderall-addicted] types.” this temporal inconsistency is so blatant, i can’t believe it wasn’t caught.
it also brings me to my next point: there was no reason for this to be set in the 90s. if you’re going to sell your novel as "historical fiction" (if you’re going to name a specific era in press materials/back matter) there should be evidence of that era all over the narrative, beyond blink-and-you-miss-it references in dialogue to a dictatorship or dead president. during my reading, i highlighted every passage i felt acted as historical mooring. less than 20 throwaway references came up, most as superficial as Jeopardy! or the price of a buffet meal ($6.99).
in a city as culturally rich as nyc, i expect more than this from an era rife with sociopolitical upheaval, counter/subcultures galore, & rampant infrastructural change. according to wambugu, an advisor told her not to do any research while writing her novel with "the idea being you can fact check it later." girl, WHAT?
(it seems she took that advice and ran.)
wambugu’s 90s-era nyc amounts to cocaine snorted in apartment bathrooms during parties riddled with cliches (love interests jump out of bushes—yes, you heard that right—or materialize right in time to catch ruth in the act). unshockingly, the party sequences are among the novel’s most trite. if we'd never been given a specific decade, nothing about the novel or my reading experience would’ve changed.
according to wambugu, this choice was necessary to avoid having to write about the internet....but writing contemporary books doesn't mean you have to include the internet? plenty of living writers have this figured out. personally, i’m sick of books that wind the clock back without any care for the historical. you want your book to be timeless, so you’ve deprived it almost completely of any ties to reality? how self-interested to think the real-world precludes books from being read outside of their life cycle. do we not often read 20th cent. lit for the express purposes of experiencing its anachronisms? does this not enrich our reading experience?
wambugu has cited rhys & morrison as inspirations behind this notion of timelessness, which made me laugh. their work is utterly of its time. that’s part of why it’s so good. there’s no reason why we can’t strike a balance between the historical & the timeless.
too often, writers who have a fear of dating their work overcorrect to such a degree that the end result is a smooth, featureless landscape with no defining aesthetic mode. the aesthetic mode is, in fact, “no aesthetic mode.”
in lonely crowds, interesting emotional threads never germinate beyond quickly snapped time-lapse-style footnotes in the diaristic renderings of ruth’s life. eight times over the course of the novel, a character asks ruth if she’s okay/how she feels (often during moments preceding or following emotional tumult), and ruth answers to the effect of, “i’m fine/okay/happy.” the dialogue doesn’t get any more riveting than this.
(i’m serious. count how many times ruth responds to someone with “cool.” end scene.)
after a point, i have to wonder how her storytelling style hasn’t encouraged introspection beyond the wan, “i didn't know why i felt that way,” or, “i wasn’t sure what that meant or who i was.” ruth describes herself as temperate + adaptable—a recipe for a boring narrator. rarely does she rise up, act, push back, or deliver more than non-answers during conversation. she’s instantly obsessed with her friend & sometimes love interest maria, for reasons (beyond the obvious) that are never really made apparent by the narrative. we don’t even learn maria is afro-latina until her country of origin (panama) is belatedly & perfunctorily named. with prose as in-your-face as wambugu’s, i found this surprising, even more so given the novel’s attempts at examining art through the lens of race/cultural grifting (i say ‘attempts’ because that thread never coheres).
an example of the time-lapse narration:
a bus driver has just committed literal manslaughter in front of a group of religious children…and that info is conveyed in 3 sentences. no build up. no care for tension or pacing. no examination of the emotional/narrative fallout. we never hear about the driver again. this is a frequent occurrence. events are summarized, brushed past, then promptly forgotten about. the order in which info is delivered becomes so flippant and so delayed i can’t help but think wambugu was trying to retrospectively justify certain plot choices by beaming motives to us from the unpaved detritus of hasty manuscript rewrites.
ruth doesn’t want the life she lives when she’s a kid, when she’s 18, when she’s married. from beginning to end, she’s unhappy and never compelled to change it (when it does change, it’s thanks to maria). what’s more, maria is never likable at any point in this bildungsroman—she gives ruth no true reason to believe she’s loved, trusted, or respected. maria is hard to please, flighty, uncaring, manipulative, hostile, irresponsible, defensive. that’s fine if you counteract the negative with some scene-writing to demonstrate why ruth likes her in the first place. but we don’t get that, so the eventual “plot twist” isn’t a twist at all. we’re knocked over the head with it from the outset.
“do you ever think about your aunt?” ruth asks maria at one point, an aunt who served as the mentally unstable parental figure responsible for maria’s earliest suffering. but maria is either asleep or pretending to be. we never get an answer. in some of the final pages of the novel, we learn of the aunt’s fate: “By the way, Maria forgot to tell me, her aunt was dead: pills.” now let’s hear a little more from maria about that death. “[Maria] didn’t want to discuss it.”
……oh! 😃
we’re left to wonder if these characters think about anything beyond their immediate physical surroundings. this is a constant affective tendency in wambugu’s novel. big feelings are rarely if ever expressed and examined between characters. here’s one place where that actually worked for me:
from an immigrant mother socialized into a staunchly religious, repressed caretaker role, this response makes perfect sense. what’s more, it’s info delivered to us through dialogue. it’s isn’t summary. it’s scene-work. all of it culminates in a way that tells us a ton about this character.
but when this happens with everyone in the novel, you’re no longer characterizing people. you’re creating a book that refuses to unpack itself or its choices with any degree of intention, that relies on ambiguity and abrupt cut-offs to carry it across the finish line. this is proven by wambugu’s emma cline-esque ending—that i won’t spoil—one deeply emblematic of contemporary litfic: catastrophe is (cheaply) hinted at, then the book fades to black. readers are left with the burden of filling in the blanks and writers can pat themselves on the back for replicating the random, senseless tragedies of real life—real life sans closure.
wow. should we all clap?
lonely crowds is a profoundly unprofound novel, formally and stylistically elementary, stunning in its ability to squander dynamic emotional set-ups and one in a long line of MFA duds. whether anyone in the literary world is willing to voice a dissenting opinion—an opinion any less than glowing—remains to be seen.
October 30, 2025
4/5
- If you’re wanting to read a book all about toxic friendship and learning to love yourself as you are, this is such a great book to pick up!
- This book really dives into the complexities of friendship and how so often we can put our life on hold or bend over backward for others that wouldn’t do the same.
- There are so many themes to dive into within this story. Would be a perfect book to use for discussion in a book club!
- If you’re wanting to read a book all about toxic friendship and learning to love yourself as you are, this is such a great book to pick up!
- This book really dives into the complexities of friendship and how so often we can put our life on hold or bend over backward for others that wouldn’t do the same.
- There are so many themes to dive into within this story. Would be a perfect book to use for discussion in a book club!
July 10, 2025
An astonishing debut, which I only reluctantly allowed myself to finish.
Ruth and Maria meet as children, before the start of a new year, at the Catholic school they both attend. Ruth is instantly mesmerized by Maria, who appears incandescent to her. Their friendship changes the course of both of their lives, forever.
We follow them into adulthood as Ruth, rather than make concrete choices of her own, follows Maria, hoping that eventually she will be held in the same high regard.
Both characters are black women, constantly having to shove themselves into spaces which are freely occupied by their white peers. I appreciated how the author did not hold the reader’s hand in crafting these scenarios.
Lonely Crowds beautifully captures the nature of a complex female friendship, but it isn’t limited to only that. It examines the painful way we sometimes grow apart from those we believe we never will.
Insanely beautiful. Captivating to the core.
Ruth and Maria meet as children, before the start of a new year, at the Catholic school they both attend. Ruth is instantly mesmerized by Maria, who appears incandescent to her. Their friendship changes the course of both of their lives, forever.
We follow them into adulthood as Ruth, rather than make concrete choices of her own, follows Maria, hoping that eventually she will be held in the same high regard.
Both characters are black women, constantly having to shove themselves into spaces which are freely occupied by their white peers. I appreciated how the author did not hold the reader’s hand in crafting these scenarios.
Lonely Crowds beautifully captures the nature of a complex female friendship, but it isn’t limited to only that. It examines the painful way we sometimes grow apart from those we believe we never will.
Insanely beautiful. Captivating to the core.
February 5, 2026
Full of a sorrow and heartache I deeply resonate with
August 18, 2025
I think I'm still recovering from this? I could tell this would be a five-star read, and I was right. I tore through it and still wished it were longer. The writing is gorgeous, and the story is one of the most intense takes on friendship I’ve possibly ever read.
This is not your typical coming-of-age story. Ruth, the quiet daughter of immigrants, meets Maria, a beautiful orphan with this magnetic, effortless charm, and their friendship becomes all-consuming.
It’s not a healthy friendship by any means. It’s obsession, jealousy, and love all tangled together. You follow their friendship from their Catholic school days into the ’90s New York art scene, where Maria’s career takes off and Ruth struggles to find her place.
Everything about these two is messy and heartbreaking. The two main characters, Ruth and Maria’s, bond reminded me so much of Sula and Nel in Sula. That intensity where you love someone so much it almost eats you alive? That feeling of being pulled toward someone like gravity? Perfectly captured on the pages.
I could not put this book down.
I saw myself in these characters, either through things I’ve personally experienced or in people I’ve known who would act the exact same way. Ruth’s fear of being alone, in particular, ran through her whole life and felt very relatable.
I don’t usually gravitate toward coming-of-age novels, but there was something so special here. It’s such a heartbreaking but beautiful debut.
This is not your typical coming-of-age story. Ruth, the quiet daughter of immigrants, meets Maria, a beautiful orphan with this magnetic, effortless charm, and their friendship becomes all-consuming.
It’s not a healthy friendship by any means. It’s obsession, jealousy, and love all tangled together. You follow their friendship from their Catholic school days into the ’90s New York art scene, where Maria’s career takes off and Ruth struggles to find her place.
Everything about these two is messy and heartbreaking. The two main characters, Ruth and Maria’s, bond reminded me so much of Sula and Nel in Sula. That intensity where you love someone so much it almost eats you alive? That feeling of being pulled toward someone like gravity? Perfectly captured on the pages.
I could not put this book down.
I saw myself in these characters, either through things I’ve personally experienced or in people I’ve known who would act the exact same way. Ruth’s fear of being alone, in particular, ran through her whole life and felt very relatable.
I don’t usually gravitate toward coming-of-age novels, but there was something so special here. It’s such a heartbreaking but beautiful debut.
August 25, 2025
cannot tell if this book was underwhelming or just not what i was expecting. for a novel told in the first person i have never felt so far removed from a character. and maybe this is intentional, some stylistic choice to display how maria’s role in ruth’s life has limited her own interiority. but the thing is that i was also not convinced of maria and ruth’s connection at all. it all felt so disjointed but maybe this book will work for someone else!
October 9, 2025
"It's your own fault you don't paint. It isn't Maria. It isn't your mother. Or Art or your old boss. Or me. It's that you're lazy, self-pitying, directionless, insecure, spoiled. You walk around like you're so persecuted. Please," Ed said.
Reading this felt like stepping into a black-and-white film. That doesn't sound so bad until you sit with the fact that the story revolves around two artists; it should've been vibrant, colorful, things should be happening!! A review I came across described it as another entry in the “domestic dread” genre, and it's completely spot on. Where to even begin?
Ruth meets Maria right before starting at a new school, and from that moment on, she’s taken by her. Maria, an orphan, quickly becomes a fixture in Ruth and her family's life. Ruth follows her from high school to college and eventually New York City, as they try to navigate their way through adulthood. Ruth is the narrator and supposedly the main character, but her fixation on Maria consumes everything. When Ruth isn’t with her, she’s thinking about her: what she’s doing, not doing, or could be doing.
The book was extremely depressing to read as Ruth really relinquished all control in her life. I still can’t believe she was supposed to be an artist; she barely even wanted to paint, yet somehow thought she was owed success. The story is so ridiculous I’m not sure how I even finished it—partly out of disbelief that this was really the whole book. Reading all these rave reviews got me feeling like I'm in the Twilight Zone. I must have gotten a different copy.
June 15, 2025
WOW. This is going to be the release of the year I can’t wait for everyone to read it
September 1, 2025
2.5/5
i’ll preface this by saying i read this book right after a 5 star read so perhaps the relativity dulled my reading experience.
i disliked the prose from the first sentence which begins “I was born in August and it was August. Since it was my birthday, I blew out my candles.”
there was no reprieve from this monotony and the book stars my least favorite narrator a woman who allows life to come at her and gives no reaction, whose pretty privilege and convenient talent allows her to get by. also a book full of unlikable characters which is clearly intentional but not pleasant for me as a reader.
i can see this resonating with someone who reads less mindlessly and is less plot driven.
(rounding up, it’s a debut novel)
i’ll preface this by saying i read this book right after a 5 star read so perhaps the relativity dulled my reading experience.
i disliked the prose from the first sentence which begins “I was born in August and it was August. Since it was my birthday, I blew out my candles.”
there was no reprieve from this monotony and the book stars my least favorite narrator a woman who allows life to come at her and gives no reaction, whose pretty privilege and convenient talent allows her to get by. also a book full of unlikable characters which is clearly intentional but not pleasant for me as a reader.
i can see this resonating with someone who reads less mindlessly and is less plot driven.
(rounding up, it’s a debut novel)
October 19, 2025
that ending, girl what
January 23, 2025
This was such a beautiful debut and I am delighted for Lonely Crowds to be my first read of the year, the bar is nicely set!
My only criticism is that I wanted this book to be a lot thicker - this book could have been a ‘A Little Life' level of thickness and I would not have noticed. I was panicking as I realised I was reaching the end of the book - I wasn’t ready to leave.
Stephanie Wambugu is now an author whose work I will constantly be keeping an out eye for. Thank you to the publishers for this ARC!
My only criticism is that I wanted this book to be a lot thicker - this book could have been a ‘A Little Life' level of thickness and I would not have noticed. I was panicking as I realised I was reaching the end of the book - I wasn’t ready to leave.
Stephanie Wambugu is now an author whose work I will constantly be keeping an out eye for. Thank you to the publishers for this ARC!
August 15, 2025
God I’m relieved to be rid of this
May 29, 2025
This is an odd one. Wambugu is clearly talented, though her writing is oddly flat throughout. At first, I found this off-putting, but then it drew me in: it felt appropriate for Ruth, a strange child and then adult, who is not really attuned to her own emotions and certainly not to other people's. The first half of this book is much stronger than the second: Wambugu does a great job of showing what these codependent friendships can be like, especially when one child has a very fraught home life that the other only partly understands. Her rendering of Ruth's parents is also brilliant and vivid: I felt like I totally knew her domineering mother and fade-into-the-background father. You don't often read a book about childhood where the child just does not care for her parents, but that dynamic felt real and believable here.
The book gets weaker as the characters go to college and especially become adults. The relationship between the girls ebbs and flows, but it felt to me like it should probably have reached a crisis earlier, and was being dragged out for the sake of the book.
That said, again, Wambugu is clearly talented and she is very young. So I'll be curious to see if she can improve some of these structural problems in her next book.
The book gets weaker as the characters go to college and especially become adults. The relationship between the girls ebbs and flows, but it felt to me like it should probably have reached a crisis earlier, and was being dragged out for the sake of the book.
That said, again, Wambugu is clearly talented and she is very young. So I'll be curious to see if she can improve some of these structural problems in her next book.
July 26, 2025
I don’t even know where to go with this review because, to be honest, I’ve never read two characters as emotionally crippled as these girls right here. This is absolutely not a fun coming of age & friendship story, this is just about the cost of not being able to set boundaries and confusing mutual obsession & jealousy for love. At the end of it all, I really just wanted both of them to see a therapist and maybe spend some time in a psych ward - which means it has to be 5 stars from me because I’ll FEAST on a mutual misery storyline. That ending??? Jaw on the floor. Also HUGE for the My Brilliant Friend girlies!!!
February 6, 2026
4.5 // “Adults spent their lives trying to remember what they knew originally as children and in the same breath they dismissed children's insights.”
I’m kinda obsessed. While reading this novel, I came across a reviewer comparing the friendship/story to the Neapolitan Quartet (My Brilliant Friend, etc.) And you know what, I totally get that. The friendship between Ruth and Maria is very Elena and Lila coded. That undeniable connection you have with a person while not understanding what draws you to one another. Maria is an enigma; aloof, proud, loud, infuriating, possessive, alluring. Ruth feels like she is constantly in her friend’s shadow; most of the time it’s self-inflicted. Between these two, there’s an obsessive love on the verge of shattering.
I was really drawn into this Bildungsroman. At first, it tested my patience, but as the narrative continued, I found myself getting immersed and invested, deeper and deeper. These friends love to hurt one another; they don’t know any other way. Nothing is straightforward, nothing is stable. These are complex emotions, connections, and histories between two impassioned young women. Bruised egos, tainted loyalties.
A huge surprise for me was that I hadn't realized that the novel was going to move through childhood to true adulthood. Perhaps, it says that on the book flap but I didn’t re-look at it when I started the book. This structure made me feel like I had just gone through an intense journey. We get to see Ruth and Maria go through school, relationships, careers, and the act of settling down.
I started to get sad when I was approaching the last few pages because I knew I would miss reading about these characters, despite how unpleasant and upsetting they can be. It just feels like you’ve witnessed the depth of someone’s life and it’s hard to suddenly walk away from that insight. And then the way the book actually ends, I’m like, oh God, you can’t leave me this way, I need to know more. What a lump-in-the-throat way to end this.
I will definitely follow this writer’s career. I’m impressed.
I’m kinda obsessed. While reading this novel, I came across a reviewer comparing the friendship/story to the Neapolitan Quartet (My Brilliant Friend, etc.) And you know what, I totally get that. The friendship between Ruth and Maria is very Elena and Lila coded. That undeniable connection you have with a person while not understanding what draws you to one another. Maria is an enigma; aloof, proud, loud, infuriating, possessive, alluring. Ruth feels like she is constantly in her friend’s shadow; most of the time it’s self-inflicted. Between these two, there’s an obsessive love on the verge of shattering.
I was really drawn into this Bildungsroman. At first, it tested my patience, but as the narrative continued, I found myself getting immersed and invested, deeper and deeper. These friends love to hurt one another; they don’t know any other way. Nothing is straightforward, nothing is stable. These are complex emotions, connections, and histories between two impassioned young women. Bruised egos, tainted loyalties.
A huge surprise for me was that I hadn't realized that the novel was going to move through childhood to true adulthood. Perhaps, it says that on the book flap but I didn’t re-look at it when I started the book. This structure made me feel like I had just gone through an intense journey. We get to see Ruth and Maria go through school, relationships, careers, and the act of settling down.
I started to get sad when I was approaching the last few pages because I knew I would miss reading about these characters, despite how unpleasant and upsetting they can be. It just feels like you’ve witnessed the depth of someone’s life and it’s hard to suddenly walk away from that insight. And then the way the book actually ends, I’m like, oh God, you can’t leave me this way, I need to know more. What a lump-in-the-throat way to end this.
I will definitely follow this writer’s career. I’m impressed.
November 28, 2025
one of the best debut novels this year
September 23, 2025
A low 4
While I see a lot of merits to this book—the intense, personal prose, the exploration through an interesting plot of themes of friendship, queerness and comp het, Ruth’s distance from herself and her whole life are so deeply depressing and self-inflicted, it’s hard to root for her. I feel like some literary fiction falls into this rut of being so removed, blasè and pessimistic about life that even if the writing is good, it just leaves you going…okay?? What did this really reveal about the main character aside from what we already knew? Some great elements here, but overall I can’t say I enjoyed this all that much
While I see a lot of merits to this book—the intense, personal prose, the exploration through an interesting plot of themes of friendship, queerness and comp het, Ruth’s distance from herself and her whole life are so deeply depressing and self-inflicted, it’s hard to root for her. I feel like some literary fiction falls into this rut of being so removed, blasè and pessimistic about life that even if the writing is good, it just leaves you going…okay?? What did this really reveal about the main character aside from what we already knew? Some great elements here, but overall I can’t say I enjoyed this all that much
March 16, 2025
Painful and soul crushing in a good way
Read
August 13, 2025DNF. Couldn't get past the not so great writing.
December 30, 2025
Actual Rating: 2.5 stars, rounded down
How many times do I have to say that I am SICK AND TIRED of ambivalent fiction!!!! I talked about this in my review of Middle Spoon by Alejandro Varela, but the MFA crowd has got to start caring more about their own work—if they don’t, why should I? To Stephanie Wambugu’s credit, she’s doing a much better job than some of these authors—this isn’t a full hate review, and by the end I definitely wanted to finish out the story. But, it’s a long road uphill—let me share how.
Lonely Crowds literally made me start a new bookshelf, friendship (derogatory). I just can’t stand these sort of relational dynamics, where the one person so blatantly mistreats the other, and a lot of the attraction is based on either self-hate or hate of everyone else in the universe. Here, Ruth is the friend who has to triple text for the plans to happen, even though Maria literally relies on the plans happening more than Ruth. I was just talking with my mom about this, as she is still struggling to share the vacation planning load with her homegirls, and they are in their late fifties and early sixties!!! So in this way, it’s cool to see this sort of dynamic played out across the years in this novel. This sort of close, overlapping friendship where the joys and sorrows of one’s lives feel directly comparable is so common, and so I do appreciate the study of it (even if it’s harsh at points.) See some examples below:
If for some reason you actually like books with this level of hard-to-watch friendship, I’d recommend Patsy by Nicole Dennis-Benn, because while the protagonist has a similar level of self-sacrifice and self-hatred, she eventually snaps out of it and finds relationships with people who return her love!! So, it’s Lonely Crowds with a happy ending. I’m also reading All the Way to The River by Elizabeth Gilbert, and that story has a similar “us against the world” element to the friendship. Funnily enough, that book also includes characters literally walking to the East River in New York. Definitely would not recommend unless you have a very high cringe tolerance.
Some other things that I enjoyed in this book: Ruth’s preoccupation with the marital and childbearing futures of her classmates, and her wry takes on the weird situations Maria gets her into. For instance, when she’s being cuckolded to a Tracy Chapman album, she stays put until “The protest songs were starting to sound sinister and I wanted to go home.” (101) Speaking of shit Maria puts Ruth into, I cannot believe she walked back the climactic scene, and blamed it on Ruth!!! Just despicable stuff, but I guess it kept me reading, so that counts for something? Finally, I enjoyed Ed’s character, and I thought Ruth’s sense of obligation to him was a really compelling way of describing why people stay in relationships with men they deem good enough. See here:
In closing, I can’t say this has a glowing recommendation from me, but I think some people could find some things they enjoy here!!! So, take your pick.
How many times do I have to say that I am SICK AND TIRED of ambivalent fiction!!!! I talked about this in my review of Middle Spoon by Alejandro Varela, but the MFA crowd has got to start caring more about their own work—if they don’t, why should I? To Stephanie Wambugu’s credit, she’s doing a much better job than some of these authors—this isn’t a full hate review, and by the end I definitely wanted to finish out the story. But, it’s a long road uphill—let me share how.
Lonely Crowds literally made me start a new bookshelf, friendship (derogatory). I just can’t stand these sort of relational dynamics, where the one person so blatantly mistreats the other, and a lot of the attraction is based on either self-hate or hate of everyone else in the universe. Here, Ruth is the friend who has to triple text for the plans to happen, even though Maria literally relies on the plans happening more than Ruth. I was just talking with my mom about this, as she is still struggling to share the vacation planning load with her homegirls, and they are in their late fifties and early sixties!!! So in this way, it’s cool to see this sort of dynamic played out across the years in this novel. This sort of close, overlapping friendship where the joys and sorrows of one’s lives feel directly comparable is so common, and so I do appreciate the study of it (even if it’s harsh at points.) See some examples below:
I braced myself for Maria’s judgment. If she didn’t like my father, I’d have to find a new father. (37)
I’m not jealous that good things are happening to her. It’s just that I wish something good would happen to me, too. (233)
Does one of us need to lose so that the other can win? (236)
If for some reason you actually like books with this level of hard-to-watch friendship, I’d recommend Patsy by Nicole Dennis-Benn, because while the protagonist has a similar level of self-sacrifice and self-hatred, she eventually snaps out of it and finds relationships with people who return her love!! So, it’s Lonely Crowds with a happy ending. I’m also reading All the Way to The River by Elizabeth Gilbert, and that story has a similar “us against the world” element to the friendship. Funnily enough, that book also includes characters literally walking to the East River in New York. Definitely would not recommend unless you have a very high cringe tolerance.
Some other things that I enjoyed in this book: Ruth’s preoccupation with the marital and childbearing futures of her classmates, and her wry takes on the weird situations Maria gets her into. For instance, when she’s being cuckolded to a Tracy Chapman album, she stays put until “The protest songs were starting to sound sinister and I wanted to go home.” (101) Speaking of shit Maria puts Ruth into, I cannot believe she walked back the climactic scene, and blamed it on Ruth!!! Just despicable stuff, but I guess it kept me reading, so that counts for something? Finally, I enjoyed Ed’s character, and I thought Ruth’s sense of obligation to him was a really compelling way of describing why people stay in relationships with men they deem good enough. See here:
It would have been unfair to say no and leave him stranded, having to start over at thirty-five with another woman after all of his goodwill and generosity toward me. I believed, basically, that a person deserved to recoup on their investments. Not to mention that I loved Ed and had come to depend on him being in my life. Remember that, Ruth, that you love him. (227)
In closing, I can’t say this has a glowing recommendation from me, but I think some people could find some things they enjoy here!!! So, take your pick.
February 12, 2026
I don’t know what’s wrong with me jumping into these soul crushing books but clearly I’m the problem. This book is about friendship, longing, living, learning, experiencing, and the journey. This was a tumultuous friendship and it felt like I was watching a train wreck. How many of us are willing to save our friendships no what matter what? If you are this person or even if you aren’t read this book. If you are a person who likes things wrapped up nicely at the end, this may not be the book for you. I love that this book left us on a trail of what ifs and also left the ending up to the readers imagination… I will be back for this author’s work.
January 1, 2026
Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu is a coming-of-age novel set in early-2010s Kenya. It is about young people trying to figure out who they are while feeling lonely, even when they’re surrounded by others. The crowded cities make the characters’ isolation stand out even more. It’s a book about the uncomfortable stage of growing up when you don’t quite know where you belong yet.
August 6, 2025
In third grade, Ruth meets Maria in their all-girl Catholic school. As a visual minority in Providence, Ruth excitedly fixates on befriending the new girl with Panamanian ancestry. Ruth’s nuclear family includes her mom and dad, and her religious and traditional parents raise Ruth with traditional Western values suitable for a girl in the 70s or so. Maria’s parents are not in the picture: Maria states that her biological dad left when she was young, and her mother was diagnosed as bipolar and died by suicide. Her undisciplined presence and behavior capture Ruth’s attention, and unexpected Ruth will not drift from Maria’s gravitational pull for the rest of their lives.
As the two attend college together, studying and creating art—Ruth with canvas painting; Maria with multimedia film—they test their transition into adulthood. They test their sexuality, use of drugs, social circles, and art’s messaging. Ruth overtly depends on Maria for approval and direction while Maria more subtly relies on Ruth for stability, even if the two remain unaware of their mutuality. When they move to New York as young professionals breaking into the 90s art scene, Maria’s unencumbered approach to life and work (e.g., dating Sheila, an affluent, “stable” white classmate from college) helps her gain professional success.
Ruth’s trajectory seems to follow Maria’s prophecy from when they were young girls: Ruth is the marrying type. Surely enough, after Ruth marries Ed, a 35-year-old writer who has received modest recognition for his work, Maria confesses her need for Ruth to leave Ed and choose her instead. When Ruth consents and arrives to meet Maria at their designated hotel, Maria doesn’t show. Ruth returns to Ed and rebuilds their marriage.
Wambugu’s slow-paced coming-of-age tale vividly reproduces the grade school classroom. Ruth and Maria’s partnered exploration of their neighborhood, how adults operate, and girlhood offers a hint of hope to come “when they grow up.” However, Lonely Crowds lives in the register of longing; the girls don’t allow themselves to acknowledge and thus communicate their internal feelings for fear of rejection or displacement, either from each other or society. Maria’s emotional manipulation of Ruth brings up the question of her mental health—to our knowledge, she doesn’t seem to have bipolar disorder like her mom and aunt, but perhaps the genetic and environmental components may have increased the likelihood of its development. As a more traditional coming-of-age novel, Lonely Crowds progresses linearly and unfolds from Ruth’s perspective only. The women’s fallout or slow estrangement feels slightly strained. Still, I appreciate Wambugu’s debut for giving voice to Kenyan American characters.
I rate Lonely Crowds 3.5 stars. My thanks to Little, Brown and Company and NetGalley for an ARC.
As the two attend college together, studying and creating art—Ruth with canvas painting; Maria with multimedia film—they test their transition into adulthood. They test their sexuality, use of drugs, social circles, and art’s messaging. Ruth overtly depends on Maria for approval and direction while Maria more subtly relies on Ruth for stability, even if the two remain unaware of their mutuality. When they move to New York as young professionals breaking into the 90s art scene, Maria’s unencumbered approach to life and work (e.g., dating Sheila, an affluent, “stable” white classmate from college) helps her gain professional success.
Ruth’s trajectory seems to follow Maria’s prophecy from when they were young girls: Ruth is the marrying type. Surely enough, after Ruth marries Ed, a 35-year-old writer who has received modest recognition for his work, Maria confesses her need for Ruth to leave Ed and choose her instead. When Ruth consents and arrives to meet Maria at their designated hotel, Maria doesn’t show. Ruth returns to Ed and rebuilds their marriage.
Wambugu’s slow-paced coming-of-age tale vividly reproduces the grade school classroom. Ruth and Maria’s partnered exploration of their neighborhood, how adults operate, and girlhood offers a hint of hope to come “when they grow up.” However, Lonely Crowds lives in the register of longing; the girls don’t allow themselves to acknowledge and thus communicate their internal feelings for fear of rejection or displacement, either from each other or society. Maria’s emotional manipulation of Ruth brings up the question of her mental health—to our knowledge, she doesn’t seem to have bipolar disorder like her mom and aunt, but perhaps the genetic and environmental components may have increased the likelihood of its development. As a more traditional coming-of-age novel, Lonely Crowds progresses linearly and unfolds from Ruth’s perspective only. The women’s fallout or slow estrangement feels slightly strained. Still, I appreciate Wambugu’s debut for giving voice to Kenyan American characters.
I rate Lonely Crowds 3.5 stars. My thanks to Little, Brown and Company and NetGalley for an ARC.
August 16, 2025
Okay, OKAY. I thoroughly enjoyed this one.
LC is a tragic book about obsession, authenticity, and sacrifice. SW's writing is so distinct. She has a special ability to hold you in a fix of uncertainty, whilst people and places whisk by. It threw me through a loop at first. I felt that I was being held at a remove, sort of blue-balled by the unsentimental prose, the detachment, the way characters appear as though we already knew them then are gone before the next page. It has the quality of classic literature in that way, so assured and swift. I was won over in the end. The writing creates a reading experience so thick with tension and a sense of the unsaid. As I kept going, I felt it was both the point of the book and the only way to capture our protagonist, Ruth.
Ruth is passive, shameful, cynical, and privately obsessed with her childhood friend Maria, who feels both like her torturer and her beating heart--the thing that makes her life possible. Ruth and Maria's suffering has so much to do with each other, but they can never bridge the gap between them. Ruth's family practically adopts Maria, they room together in college, then they occupy interconnected spheres of the art world in 90s NYC; they're always right next to each other. Yet, their moments of harmony are so far dispersed (if not nonexistent) because of their shame, thorniness, and obstinance. You get the sense this was the only way these characters can exist. That if they broke through to each other, they might not know what to do, or who they are. Deeply sad. I am impressed. My only wish is that the book was longer !
"I don't know if I will ever be myself"
LC is a tragic book about obsession, authenticity, and sacrifice. SW's writing is so distinct. She has a special ability to hold you in a fix of uncertainty, whilst people and places whisk by. It threw me through a loop at first. I felt that I was being held at a remove, sort of blue-balled by the unsentimental prose, the detachment, the way characters appear as though we already knew them then are gone before the next page. It has the quality of classic literature in that way, so assured and swift. I was won over in the end. The writing creates a reading experience so thick with tension and a sense of the unsaid. As I kept going, I felt it was both the point of the book and the only way to capture our protagonist, Ruth.
Ruth is passive, shameful, cynical, and privately obsessed with her childhood friend Maria, who feels both like her torturer and her beating heart--the thing that makes her life possible. Ruth and Maria's suffering has so much to do with each other, but they can never bridge the gap between them. Ruth's family practically adopts Maria, they room together in college, then they occupy interconnected spheres of the art world in 90s NYC; they're always right next to each other. Yet, their moments of harmony are so far dispersed (if not nonexistent) because of their shame, thorniness, and obstinance. You get the sense this was the only way these characters can exist. That if they broke through to each other, they might not know what to do, or who they are. Deeply sad. I am impressed. My only wish is that the book was longer !
"I don't know if I will ever be myself"
July 29, 2025
Lonely Crowds explores multiple topics: childhood crushes, girls growing into women, being Black in locations that are predominantly white, making art, sexual identity. These are all topics I'm interested in, but there was bleakness to the novel that had me holding it figuratively at arm's length.
Lately I seem to be running into a lot of novels about people giving up on childhood dreams and then not really knowing where to head next, so they wind up in a vague territory that allows them to more-or-less make ends meet, but that doesn't allow the kind of satisfaction they thought their childhood dreams had promised.
Lonely Crowds is *not exactly* that book, but is has that same sense of resignation and confusion. The issues it's exploring are important, but I just can't embrace them in my reading at a time when so many of our real world values are being compromised, shredded, trampled underfoot.
A number of readers I respect have rated this novel highly. If you're feeling the way I am right now, this probably isn't a good time to pick Lonely Crowds, but there *will* be a good time to pick it up—and those five-star reviews will give you a taste of what you may experience.
I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via Net Galley; the opinions are my own.
Lately I seem to be running into a lot of novels about people giving up on childhood dreams and then not really knowing where to head next, so they wind up in a vague territory that allows them to more-or-less make ends meet, but that doesn't allow the kind of satisfaction they thought their childhood dreams had promised.
Lonely Crowds is *not exactly* that book, but is has that same sense of resignation and confusion. The issues it's exploring are important, but I just can't embrace them in my reading at a time when so many of our real world values are being compromised, shredded, trampled underfoot.
A number of readers I respect have rated this novel highly. If you're feeling the way I am right now, this probably isn't a good time to pick Lonely Crowds, but there *will* be a good time to pick it up—and those five-star reviews will give you a taste of what you may experience.
I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via Net Galley; the opinions are my own.
October 19, 2025
BIG SIGH
(changed from 4 stars to 3 stars. 3.5)
(changed from 4 stars to 3 stars. 3.5)
December 21, 2025
This has just entered my top 5 books ever list. Delicious. Gutting. I love love LOVE authors that can put complicated feelings and phenomena into the most simple and poetic language. So many BANGER lines about female friendship, being a “creative”, and heteronormativity. My heart ached for our girl Ruth.
Stephanie I’m about to stalk you and read every sentence of yours I can humanly find. My next read is going to be “so much blue” by percival Everett, because I saw Stephanie recommended it in a book list on insta. Excited for Christmas and more reading time. And to have discovered a new wonderful black woman author. Lovely
Stephanie I’m about to stalk you and read every sentence of yours I can humanly find. My next read is going to be “so much blue” by percival Everett, because I saw Stephanie recommended it in a book list on insta. Excited for Christmas and more reading time. And to have discovered a new wonderful black woman author. Lovely
Want to read
October 24, 2025i love how immediately after i used an audiobook credit on this i am seeing nothing but negative reviews on my feed... LA LA LA LA i pretend i do not see it
Read
December 26, 2025ok, so I picked this back up and finished it, which I think does say something - it's a bit hard for me to return to a book that I pause. Overall, I think this book was well done and well crafted - and I didn't love it. For me, it would probably be toward a 3 star. The narrator remained so remote, and I pondered a reviewer who observed that Maria was not a good friend. I also read Writers & Lovers and most of Heart the Lover in the interim, and felt like those books covered some similar coming-of-age topics and yet had radically different tones. Which is fine, but this one was much less fun, and invited comparisons to me to Elena Ferrante, but didn't have the same dark intensity.
~Dec 10 2025:
note at 23% in:
First, congrats to everyone who is starting to describe writing as being similar to Elif Batuman's, because that will get me every time. So "Luster meets The Idiot", I'm sold.
My hold is getting returned to the library at 23% in, and I've already re-requested it, but pausing at this point in the story, I'll say I'm really looking forward to when Maria and Ruth get out of their "bleak" childhoods (another descriptor from the blurb, so I can't say I wasn't warned). I don't mind bleak stories (I THINK) but it feels especially excruciating when they are being experienced by characters with little/no agency (although I also just got to the part about the fairly old man who is still constantly oppressed by his childhood, so maybe the experience just continues on for some/everyone?).
Also, this book falls into my favorite category of story, "woman tells a story of her past while reflecting with subsequent wisdom," but it makes me wonder if I actually like that when the reflection is on childhood, vs (young) adulthood. But it does also seem that it will be a story of female friendships, another favorite topic!
But I do like the writing, and especially uniquely, the child perspective - for example, "I braced myself for Maria’s judgment. If she didn’t like my father, I’d have to find a new father."
Although there are things I wonder about, especially while reading surreal books (my concomitant reread of Bunny comes to mind, and other works that I wonder how literally we are to take them - but with this example, maybe it is literal :\ ) "They walked weirdly. They staggered. Years later it would occur to me that they were drunk. That nearly everyone in town was most of the time."
Speaking of con-reading, this angle on religion made me think of notes from Falling Hour "but she loved Billie Holiday. In retrospect, Holiday was a very Catholic figure: long-suffering, impoverished, schooled in a convent as a child."
And this brutal nugget made me think of Things in Nature Merely Grow: "A new understanding: that a parent brought a child to the beach and left childless. Childhood was the apprehension of these lacunae, these unfillable gaps."
~Dec 10 2025:
note at 23% in:
First, congrats to everyone who is starting to describe writing as being similar to Elif Batuman's, because that will get me every time. So "Luster meets The Idiot", I'm sold.
My hold is getting returned to the library at 23% in, and I've already re-requested it, but pausing at this point in the story, I'll say I'm really looking forward to when Maria and Ruth get out of their "bleak" childhoods (another descriptor from the blurb, so I can't say I wasn't warned). I don't mind bleak stories (I THINK) but it feels especially excruciating when they are being experienced by characters with little/no agency (although I also just got to the part about the fairly old man who is still constantly oppressed by his childhood, so maybe the experience just continues on for some/everyone?).
Also, this book falls into my favorite category of story, "woman tells a story of her past while reflecting with subsequent wisdom," but it makes me wonder if I actually like that when the reflection is on childhood, vs (young) adulthood. But it does also seem that it will be a story of female friendships, another favorite topic!
But I do like the writing, and especially uniquely, the child perspective - for example, "I braced myself for Maria’s judgment. If she didn’t like my father, I’d have to find a new father."
Although there are things I wonder about, especially while reading surreal books (my concomitant reread of Bunny comes to mind, and other works that I wonder how literally we are to take them - but with this example, maybe it is literal :\ ) "They walked weirdly. They staggered. Years later it would occur to me that they were drunk. That nearly everyone in town was most of the time."
Speaking of con-reading, this angle on religion made me think of notes from Falling Hour "but she loved Billie Holiday. In retrospect, Holiday was a very Catholic figure: long-suffering, impoverished, schooled in a convent as a child."
And this brutal nugget made me think of Things in Nature Merely Grow: "A new understanding: that a parent brought a child to the beach and left childless. Childhood was the apprehension of these lacunae, these unfillable gaps."
December 24, 2025
gorgeous and enthralling, with more than a few triggering “is this fucking play about us” moments of interrogating queer friendships 😭
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