![]() ![]() ![]() A key part of the book's thrill is how Leilani gives Edie room to seek power and agency in her questionable choices, even if it means her own annihilation. Luster probes desire and despair at the intersection of capitalism, racism and sexism. "It's the women she encounters who treat her seriously and who challenge her in such a way where there is less room for performance, and more room is made to inhabit herself authentically…" It is these relationships that are most interesting to Leilani as she told The Believer. To further complicate matters, Edie then becomes tangled up in his family under the same roof, tiptoeing around wife Rebecca, who may or may not be accepting of her open marriage, and their adopted black daughter Akila. Meanwhile, she seeks affirmation and intimacy through her borderline violent affair with an older married man – Eric the archivist. After losing her demeaning job in a publishing company, she joins the gig economy and lands headfirst in a customer's cheesecake. ![]() She struggles to make ends meet and clings on to her cockroach-infested apartment. Edie is a young black woman who aspires to make art – earnestly so, as Leilani has said – but is constantly teetering on the precipice of failure. The candour of her calamitous key protagonist is endearing from the off. The specificity is astounding, even in those fleeting moments in everyday life so easy to glaze over. Her style of prose is so brutally visceral, voluble and effusive, yet the sentences are so precise. Raven Leilani's Luster is one hell of a debut novel. ![]()
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