I wouldn’t recommend this book to others, not because it was badly written (it wasn’t) or because it was boring (it wasn’t) but because I didn’t like how uncomfortable I felt throughout the whole thing.
I’m not a squeamish reader - I can do violence, sex, depravity with no problem- but the self-destructiveness and lack of self-respect that the main character exhibited was just so unenjoyable. I wanted to constantly shake her and yell, “WTF?” Unfortunately, she would probably enjoy that.
I think the ending shows her on a slightly more encouraging path, but I didn’t really see much evidence of personal growth to believe she’ll stay on it.

“I have come to the part of the night where I am incapable of any uppercase emotion, & every circuit responsible for my cellular regeneration has begun to smoke.”
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Edie {SBF, 23, underemployed artist} & Eric (MWM, 46, having a mid-life crisis) have sex for the first time on the first page of LUSTER, before they’ve even met. He’s got an open marriage, so if they follow certain rules, It’s Okay. But author Raven Leilani starts placing explosives around that foundation immediately, & has soon blasted it all to hell. What follows is a heady cacophony of racial & sexual politics, a burrowing into a life driven by trauma & neuroses, with few of the guardrails that most of us take for granted.
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If my lizard brain wrote reviews this would just be one long wail: THE GODDAMN PROOOOOOSE!!!! Is Raven Leilani even using the same raw material as the rest of us?! Seems impossible. Her sentences are transcendent. Stiletto blades in rococo scabbards. The fluffiest Persian house cat that hasn’t been de-clawed. I spent the entire first chapter screaming perfect lines at friends over text & the entire book grinding them between my molars, savoring their substance. Nothing I can say about this book will be as persuasive as Leilani’s mastery of language is.
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Yet we’ve all had the experience of reading a novel penned by a precocious writer, the lovely sentences of which didn’t drape together into a cohesive garment. Not so here. While this is literary fiction at its MOST litfic’y—obsessed with internality, more pathos than action, likely to lose anyone who reads books for plot only—it never drags or gets lost in its own navel. Two characters ride a roller coaster in the early going, which turns out to be a clever bit of foreshadowing because LUSTER drags the reader forward at a breakneck speed. Each carefully crafted, contemplative sentence is also a crucial accelerant. This propulsion is even more of a marvel when you consider that we spend the majority of the book deep in Edie’s head, where the miasma of depression is paired with a shrugging inevitability toward micro-abuses, occasionally punctuated by dark humor. She accepts (at times even welcomes) a degree of debasement as the tradeoff for connection & visibility. This is the kind of distilled desperation that I would normally only want to view from the other side of the glass; but Leilani had me fully inside and invested, despite not always being fully comfortable.
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Love to be proven wrong about things like this, but I can’t fathom picking up a more beautiful feast of language & humanity this year. Does Raven Leilani have a Genius grant yet?

How about now?

You know I‘ll never TELL you to go buy a book, bc I hate being told what to do & also that’s not the kind of energy I’m trying to put out there. But yo, if you’ve ever trusted my opinion on a book & had that trust validated by your own experience with it, then do yourself the favor of diving on top of the nearest copy of LUSTER that you can find!

This isn't for me. I've tried repeatedly to get into it but at 20%, I''m still not invested. There was one sentence that was over two pages long. I'm sure it's literature gold for some people but I need more straight-forward storytelling.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this book.

I've read one of Raven Leilani's short stories and was really excited to try this. At first glance, Luster seems to be a story you've read many time before: young woman, crappy apartment, underemployed, trying to get her life together. But Luster's beautiful writing and unconventional twists and turns make it stand out.

Luster is the story of a 23 year old woman with body image and self-esteem issues who enters into a relationship with an older, married white man in an open marriage. Their relationship is definitely different (his wife gives them rules). Not so surprisingly, Edie ends up befriending the couple's daughter, who, like her, is Black.

I loved the smart, unflinching writing. Edie's observations are unexpected and so compelling. Something about the narration reminded me of My Dark Vanessa - maybe the brutal honesty of the main character's internal monologue and the 20+ year age difference between Edie and Erik.

Raven Leilani is definitely a debut writer to keep an eye on!

I wasn't expecting this book to play out the way it did based on the description. It had so much more depth and strangeness than was implied by the blurb. In the best way. At first it took time to get used to the level of stark self-criticism of the protagonist, at times it was almost painful to read both her inner thoughts and the situations she created in her world. Once I got through that period of discomfort, I found myself compelled to keep reading to see how the situations played out. The writing was gorgeous, and that alone made it a worthwhile read.

3 stars.

I wanted to love this book. And I actually love how Ravel Leilani writes. She uses visual, poetic language and evocative prose. But something about Edie's story just left me wanting.

Luster is the story of Edie, a 20-something African-American underachiever who embarks upon a complicated relationship with married Eric (a white man she meets online). The relationship is quirky and awkward, and eventually she becomes embroiled inside Eric's marriage and develops a relationship with his wife Rebecca and their adopted black daugher Akila.

The awkwardness is palpable and intentional. I think that a different audience would absolutely love this book. I was just lukewarm with it.

*with thanks to NetGalley for the digital ARC in exchange for this honest review.

A young black woman struggling to find her way in life, professionally, artistically, and on the relationship front. An open marriage that she gets mixed into. The black, adoptive daughter to that marriage.
These were the elements from the blurb that made me request this book. I thought there were enough interesting topics here to make for an emotional and possibly eye-and-mind-opening read.

Unfortunately, for me, it was not.
I felt none of these topics received the attention they deserved, because all of the characters involved were completely dysfunctional. The four main characters never had a meaningful conversation about any of them. I didn't feel anything for any of them, and I certainly did not gain any new views about these interesting topics.

It is not that there was no emotion in the writing. I think we got a good impression of Edies thoughts and feelings. There was a lot of loneliness, self-loathing and a state of depression. The problem for me was I just didn't sympathize enough to care. I kept reading hoping that something would happen in these relationships to break it open for me, to make me start caring. But then the book just ended...

It is possible that some things got lost to me because of the writing style. I often had trouble following the lenghty, train-of-thought like sentences, especially when they were going on about things that didn't really interest me. I often had the feeling I needed to reread a passage to really get it. But again, I didn't care enough to do so.

Edie is a young Black publishing professional who is searching for connection and validation. Her parents are gone, and she is alone in the world. She stumbles into a relationship with Eric, who is much older and in an open marriage. They meet online, then go to Six Flags together, before Eric's wife presents them with a list of rules they must follow. The relationship doesn't seem to make sense, and yet it becomes the thing that holds Edie together. To say much more would spoil the many surprises that lie hidden like jewels in this expertly constructed novel. Leilani's debut is raw, sharp, and a must-read.

Can I give this book six stars? Ten? This is the literary darling you will see on end of year lists, and with good reason. The plot is deceptively simple: Edie is as lost as a 20-something can be, but her self-awareness of that fact makes the decisions they make (and her stated reasoning) fascinating. She chooses to enter a complicated "open" marriage, getting entangled in the lives of not only the husband, but the wife and their adopted daughter.

The depths come in the execution of this plot, especially in Edie's voice. I have not devoured a book this completely in years. LUSTER is everything-- an intense, funny, vivid narrator, an uncomfortable plot peppered with complicated characters, and gorgeous prose.

Leilani is a master. I can't wait to see what else she writes.

A lot of the time when I like a book that a lot of my peers don’t, it’s because they didn’t like or weren’t able to connect to any of the characters. I have a feeling that will be the case with this book. I fell in love with our hero, 23-year-old Edie, from the very first page. She is an orphan, she is poor and on the verge of being evicted from her roach-infested NYC apartment, she is the token black person at her office, she doesn’t seem to have many friends -- and yet, she is wryly astute. She seems able to take a miles-away view of her own misfortune and find it hilarious. She is also absolutely terrible -- like, goes shoplifting with a 12-year-old terrible -- and she knows it. I love her!

Luster is a shape-shifter of a novel, luring you in as a sort of dark comedy of self-sabotaging errors and keeping you hooked with an almost nonsensical fever dream of a plot. We watch as Edie pines after Eric, a white, married man in an open marriage. He is twice her age, I’m pretty sure she met him on a sugar baby website, and he wants to take her to Six Flags on their first date. In between excruciating lapses in their text conversations, she manages to get herself fired, evicted, and invited by Eric’s jealous wife to live in their suburban home while he is on a business trip, blissfully unaware. Edie becomes something of a fairy godmother to their adopted, black, tween daughter. This new role proves rather challenging when Eric returns - the atmosphere in the home is tense, rife with at least one person giving her the inexplicable silent treatment at any given time. There is the perpetual sense that she is simultaneously overstaying her welcome and growing more intimately connected to the wife. Money keeps appearing on her dresser, and it is unclear from whom.

Parts of this book smack of Otessa Moshfegh, and it was 100% written for me. Raven Leilani’s vocabulary makes me blush.

I was so excited for this novel, and it definitely lived up to the hype.

The writing was superb - writing you can sink into. Sentences that bite. Unexpected laughs. Characters with layers. So good, I already pre-ordered a copy.

Thanks to Netgalley and Farra, Straus, & Giroux for the advanced copy.

This book really took my by surprise. I read it thinking I'd get one thing, and read something entirely different, and I mean that in a good way. There aren't many book that have the power to suck you in and have your undivided attention, but that's what this book did for me. 10/10 recommend.

Edie, a 23-year-old artist, is somehow stumbling through her life. She does not have a stable partnership and the men she encounters are certainly not the ones to plan a future together, well she does not even know if that is what she wants. When she meets Eric, again, this does not seem to go beyond sex since he is twice her age, married and without the least intention of leaving his wife and daughter. When Edie finds herself suddenly unemployed without money or place to stay, something quite extraordinary happens: Eric’s wife invites her to live with them. However, it is clear who sets the rules: Rebecca.

Raven Leilani’s novel “Luster” has been named among the most anticipated novels of 2020, thus, I was quite curious to read it. The constellation of inviting the young mistress of one’s husband to live in the same house seemed quite promising for an interesting battle between two women. However, I struggled a bit with it, maybe this is due to the fact that the author quickly moves away from the central conflict and the protagonist remains a bit too bland for my liking.

When moving to the Walker family’s house, Eric is away on a business trip. Instead of having two grown-up women who have to negotiate their respective place in the household, Edie turns into another kid who is bossed around by Rebecca and forced into the role of a nanny and tutor for Akila, Rebecca and Eric’s daughter. She herself does not appear to actually dislike this arrangement and easily gives in to it. Rebecca, on the other hand, is not the self-confident and successful women, her behaviour towards Edie is quite harsh but only because she is weak and in this way wants to secure her place.

There are some minor aspects which I found quite interesting but which did not really blend into the story such as Akila and the fact that she is black and adopted. She and Edie become the victim of police brutality – a brief scene which is not pursued on a psychological, societal or political level and of which, there, the function remains unclear to me. This happens at several points where the characters find themselves in a crucial emotional situation which is not elaborated and makes them all appear a bit inanimate, like actors on a stage who perform a role in which they feel awkward and which they cannot really identify with.

Edie is neither a representative of a lost generation who does not know what to expect from a highly uncertain future, nor is she a special individual who struggles after some major life event. She also does not really develop throughout the novel which, all in all, makes her shallow and admittedly quite uninteresting. Maybe the plot might have been much more appealing from Rebecca’s or Akila’s point of view.

One of the best debuts I've ever read. I had the same feeling I did with Zadie Smith's White Teeth even though this takes a somewhat counterintuitive approach. Where White Teeth was expansive in scope, this is a lot more insular, but it pulses with just as much energy and confidence. Everything about this just worked for me. The concept, the language, the characters, the voice, the 'shamelessness,' for want of a better term. It's a book that isn't afraid of being as dark or as debased as the story requires. It's honest about the character's wants and desires and actions and motivations in a way that I don't think I've ever come across, especially as the character is a black woman. The book feels shockingly free of the burden of representation, of easy categorization, in a way that reminds me of Ellison, Baldwin, and Hurston. All stylistically different, but all committed to saying what they wanted to say, what they were moved to say, whether or not it was what others wanted to hear from people who looked like them.

“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.”
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Thanks to @netgalley and @fsgbooks for the advanced e-copy of LUSTER by Raven Leilani. Oh Luster, I couldn’t put this one down. Even when I sometimes wanted to look away in uncomfortable, awkward agony (like when Edie is caught in the house of the much older married man she’s sleeping with by his wife. Or when she confronts a coworker and ex lover demanding to know if he got her fired. Or when it seems the wife of aforementioned married man needs Edie to move in with them and befriend their adopted adolescent daughter because they are white and Edie, like their daughter, is black. Or when said married man finds out Edie has been staying at his house...). All this mixed up together with Edie’s racing, often slightly manic internal monologue - a convincingly millennial/Gen Z mashup of superego, ego and id i.e. narcissism and self-loathing with a hearty dose of loneliness and isolation - make for a narrator that is absolutely relatable and empathic even when some of the situations she finds herself in are hard to keep reading and occasionally hard to understand. This topped off with Raven Leilani’s lyrical prose, even when describing the roaches infesting Edie’s apartment, or the mice caught in sticky traps, make this book anything but “quotidian” (a lovely word peppered throughout this novel and one I am not ashamed to say I had to look up).

This book! I don’t even know where to begin! It is just so unique, and bold, and completely captivating.

I typically really enjoy what I refer to as “small but mighty” literary fiction - books under 300-ish pages that push boundaries and storytelling norms - but Luster sets itself apart from other SBMs because the story’s incredible power comes from its profound vulnerability.

Leilani’s writing is at times dreamy and exploratory, but it is also explicit, sharp, and clever. The story feels so raw and real that I found myself physically cringing, laughing, and raging through its pages.

Luster is visually and emotionally evocative. This story daringly challenges relationship norms, as well as ideas about women’s sexuality and race, and also speaks candidly about mental health. It is unflinchingly detailed, yet unapologetically blunt, and Leilani boldly crosses lines and blurs boundaries left and right.

Raven Leilani is a bold and revolutionary voice in a new wave of exploratory authors in literary fiction. I am so grateful that she gave us Luster and can’t wait to see what she creates next.

CW/TW - physical violence, police violence, abortion, m*scarriage

“For most of my life, I have not had to tell anyone where I planned to be. I could walk the length of Broadway without a face. I could perish in a fire and have no one realize until a firefighter came across my teeth in the ash.”

Luster, by Raven Leilani is a sharply written story that takes on this complex emotion and state of being with a modern flare. In her debut novel, Leilani offers a powerful take on the lengths one will go to validate their existence. Her captivating story is an eye opening experience that examines race, sexual exploration and the internal craving to be acknowledged. Luster is a contemporary triumph ideal for 2020.

“He is the most obvious thing that has ever happened to me, and all around the city it is happening to other silly, half-formed women excited by men who’ve simply met the prerequisite of living a little more life, a terribly unspecial thing that is just what happens when you keep on getting up and brushing your teeth and going to work and ignoring the whisper that comes to you at night and tells you it would be easier to be dead.”


Edie is a young Black woman in her 20’s trying to make sense of her life. As an aspiring artist, she scrutinizes the people around her with her paintbrush. Through her poor choices and actions, Edie seeks out the universe to just notice her. Not only does her inappropriate behaviors at work lead her to unemployment, but she meets Eric (an older white man) on an online dating app and begins a relationship with him. Their time together is anything but typical. Edie’s and Eric’s affair swells to more than just cybersex when she discovers that he is married and in an open marriage with his wife. Edie’s perspective on life changes when she finds herself living at Eric’s house with his wife and adopted Black daughter. While bunking in a spare bedroom, she continues to paint those around her on anything that resembles a blank canvas. As relationships evolve under the same roof, the discomfort of their circumstances continue to widen.

“A way is always made to document how we manage to survive, or in some cases, how we don’t. So I’ve tried to reproduce an inscrutable thing. I’ve made my own hunger into a practice, made everyone who passes through my life subject to a close and inappropriate reading that occasionally finds its way, often insufficiently, into paint.”


After reading Luster, I had to sit with my thoughts to make sense of what I read. The plot of this story appears straightforward, but the depth of Leilani’s writing has no boundaries. I enjoyed the clever way she intertwined Edie’s need for painting with her constant self-reflection. I immediately fell into Edie’s world filled with tons of baggage, messy characters and clouds of sadness. I was particularly intrigued by her surprise relationship with Eric’s wife and adopted Black daughter. The co-mingling of Edie and Eric’s family added a layer of despair I would never have known. I love how Leilani made me feel uncomfortable under Eric’s roof. There is a bizarreness to their codependency that fascinated me and a dolefulness to her characters that I desperately wanted to remedy. It was crazy how my feelings of intrigue and frustration could exist all at the same time. The unconventional dynamics and issues of race provided much clarity on these dimly lit characters that I so desired. While there are a few splashes of dark humor throughout Leilani’s story, her book was more of a provocative wonder that implores to be talked about. The visible feeling of loneliness is widespread in this book. If you are in the market for a relevant and meaty read, Luster sparks conversation…….read this with your bookish friends.

Thank you to Netgalley and FSG Books for the advance copy of Luster in exchange for an honest review.
Pub Date 8/4/20

This book is clever and entertaining in a number of ways that are hard to explain. It's like watching a trainwreck - I was annoyed with the main character at times, yet I still empathized with her. I'm looking forward to more works by this author!

When I think about how to describe this novel, I keep coming back to the same phrase: fever dream. It isn't realist, exactly. It isn't surrealist, exactly. It's somewhere between the two, some weird swirled mix of hyper-reality and not-exactly-reality that leaves you just enough off kilter that you never know which way it's going to go next. It's unique and weird and bold.

At first Edie will remind you of other self-destructive young women you've seen in other literary novels. She is aimless and at sea, making terrible decisions especially when it comes to men. But from the very beginning there was something about Edie that hit a little too close to home. The Too Real felt a little Too Real, and this discomfort only grows as the novel expands. Edie starts dating a married man in an open relationship (mark this as the first novel with an open relationship/polyamory as a major element where I haven't rolled my eyes five times and then quit reading it) and even though she knows it is not a good decision, she clings to it because it is something. Things eventually get Weird and it is only when it has been a bit and everyone just acts like the Weird is normal and that happens 3 or 4 times that you realize that this isn't just a realistic novel about our modern times, it is something else entirely. (Even though it is still about our modern times somehow.)

When we talk about why we need new and diverse voices, this novel is such a great example of why. Leilani's style and prose are uniquely her own just like her point of view as a young Black woman. The fact that much of the book is set in a white well-off suburban home--the scene of many a modern literary novel by a white man--only makes everything new and different she brings to it even more notable.

I did have to force myself to slow down. Leilani often has very long paragraphs, my mortal enemy because my tendency to skim kicks in, especially since the Weird can be mentioned so casually that it doesn't draw attention to itself. But I was always happy to read it, it never felt like work.

This one was dark and funny and definitely spoke to whaT it is to be 23 and searching for who you are. I really enjoyed this and thought it was sharp and witty. Definitely a book I would recommend.