Raven Leilani- Luster

 

Raven Leilani- Luster 

3 ⭐

Genre: Fiction, Contemporary, Adult, Race, Literary Fiction 

Pages:  227

Format: Paperback 

Publisher: Picador 

Date Published: 21st January 2021

Big thank you to Picador for gifting me a copy for a The Motherload Book Club (Facebook) readalong.

Book Blurb: 

Edie is just trying to survive. She’s messing up in her dead-end admin job in her all-white office, is sleeping with all the wrong men, and has failed at the only thing that meant anything to her, painting. No one seems to care that she doesn’t really know what she’s doing with her life beyond looking for her next hook-up. And then she meets Eric, a white, middle-aged archivist with a suburban family, including a wife who has sort of agreed to an open marriage and an adopted black daughter who doesn’t have a single person in her life who can show her how to do her hair. As if navigating the constantly shifting landscape of sexual and racial politics as a young black woman wasn’t already hard enough, with nowhere else left to go, Edie finds herself falling head-first into Eric’s home and family.

Razor sharp, provocatively page-turning and surprisingly tender, Luster by Raven Leilani is a painfully funny debut about what it means to be young now.

My Review: 

I had such high hopes for this book, as I read so many amazing reviews and saw people raving about this book all over the Bookstagram and BookTube. So naturally, I expected Luster to be amazing...but from the very beginning of this book, I realised that I hoped for more. More character development and a more engaging plot. At times I wanted to DNF this book, but I persevered and read it cover to cover…

The book follows a 23-year-old Eddie, who hates her job in a publishing company, as she wants to pursue her true ambition, painting. She also has an affair with Eric, who’s not only a middle-aged white man but is also in an open marriage. One day she suddenly losses her job and Rebecca, who is Eric’s wife decides to take Eddie into their house so she can help and look after their adoptive teenager Akila. The book explores and shows emotions from Eddie’s POV, how she deals with losing her job, her affair, living with Eric’s family, and her relationship with Rebecca and Akila.

I do think that Leilani is a talented writer, as some parts of the book are beautifully written, especially when she sets the scenes in such a flowy and descriptive manner. At times her writing did make me feel like I am there seeing the world from Eddie’s POV.

However, I found it so hard to connect with Eddie’s character. For me, she felt so flat, cold, detached, sarcastic and rude. It felt like for most parts she doesn’t care about anyone or anything. At times she even felt so hypocritical, especially when she says she wants to be an artist and that her ambition to do that is so strong but really doesn’t try her hardest to build her career and when it hits a barrier, she just blames it on society or the environment. I felt that she was a bit too naïve for someone who is supposed to be a 23-year-old with a degree. Her character just frustrated me so much and I honestly thought there is going to be some evolution and growth in her throughout the book but there wasn’t…

I wanted to know more of a backstory of Eric, Rebecca and Akila. I must say I liked the depiction of Eric and Akila in the book. I think these two characters were really well thought out and had quite a lot of substance to them. However, I felt that I didn’t get to know Rebecca’s character that well and I would have loved to know more about the backstory of that couple and how they came about to be in an open marriage, as I think that would’ve helped to understand Eric and Rebecca as characters more (and even relate to them).

I also think the plot of this book had so much more potential, especially to explore relationships between the characters and certain themes, such as race, identity, belonging, and family in more depth but it missed the opportunity to do so.

Overall, there were aspects of this book I enjoyed, especially Leilani’s writing but could not connect with some of the characters and the plot. I would definitely give Leilani’s writing another go if she writes another novel, but this story is not for me. 

About the Author: 

Raven's debut novel, Luster, is forthcoming from FSG August 2020. Her work has been published in Granta, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Narrative, Yale Review, Conjunctions, The Cut, and New England Review, among other publications. She completed her MFA at NYU. 

https://ravenleilani.weebly.com/