Aug 2

Aug 2 Luster

Author: Raven Leilani
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop, which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here.

Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

Sharp, comic, disruptive, tender, Raven Leilani's debut novel, Luster, sees a young black woman fall into art and someone else's open marriage

Edie is stumbling her way through her twenties — sharing a subpar apartment in Bushwick, clocking in and out of her admin job, making a series of inappropriate sexual choices. She's also, secretly, haltingly figuring her way into life as an artist. And then she meets Eric, a digital archivist with a family in New Jersey, including an autopsist wife who has agreed to an open marriage — with rules. As if navigating the constantly shifting landscapes of contemporary sexual manners and racial politics weren't hard enough, Edie finds herself unemployed and falling into Eric's family life, his home. She becomes hesitant friend to his wife and a de facto role model to his adopted daughter. Edie is the only black woman young Akila may know.

Razor sharp, darkly comic, sexually charged, socially disruptive, Luster is a portrait of a young woman trying to make her sense of her life in a tumultuous era. It is also a haunting, aching description of how hard it is to believe in your own talent and the unexpected influences that bring us into ourselves along the way.

TL;DR Review

Luster is a searing, unflinching novel about art and sex and racism and womanhood that looks its characters right in the face. It was so good.

For you if: You like novels that don’t shy away from hard, messy things.

Full Review

“It’s not that I want exactly this, to have a husband or home security system that, for the length of our marriage, never goes off. It’s that there are gray, anonymous hours like this. Hours when I am desperate, when I am ravenous, when I know how a star becomes a void.”

So, wow. This book absolutely lives up to the hype that’s been built around it. I honestly can’t believe that it’s a debut. Leilani is masterful.

The story is about a character named Edie, who is a young 20-something Black woman battling the balance between adulting and living unrestrained. She works in an underpaid role in a stifling office environment, within view of the job she really wants but can’t quite get. She struggles to paint. She seeks thrills that tend to land her in a bit of trouble. And then she starts dating Eric, who’s in his 40s and has permission from his wife to start dating other women, as long as he follows her rules. Edie ends up thrust into their lives and home in an unexpected way that changes them all (except maybe Eric, lol) forever.

From the very first chapter, I was swept off my feet by her sentences — “I only wish I could write sentences like this,” I thought. And that’s still true. But after a few chapters I realized that her real genius is at the paragraph level; her ability to build dizzying sets of sentences that burst open at the end, to use paragraphs like weapons — pages and pages long weapons, in some cases — to break off paragraphs where it’s going to cut deepest.

I wasn’t expecting but absolutely loved Edie’s relationship with Eric’s wife, Rebecca. She is fascinating, and I absolutely LOVED studying her through Edie’s eyes. And as the novel went on, focusing much more on Edie and Rebecca and Edie and Akila (Eric and Rebecca’s adopted daughter, who is Black), and less and less on Edie and Eric, I was drawn in even more.

There is just so much here. I think that this book will be a favorite by those who love both cerebral and commercial fiction. I think Raven Leilani is a force to be reckoned with. And I think I need to re-read this book a few times to get everything that it has to offer me. Read it.