They are finally meeting in person, and there is definitely chemistry between them. The book begins with a date, she’s been texting a white man named Eric who is married, but in an ‘open marriage’ with rules. She doesn’t really care about her job, but she relies on the income it brings in, and she spends what little money she has on her art paints and canvas mostly. We see the world through our protagonist Edie’s eyes she’s African-American and in her early twenties, living in a substandard apartment in New York City, working at a publishing house where she’s slept with many of her coworkers. It will be interesting to see how long this new sensitivity to touching will last in our collective psyche as we eventually move past the pandemic, but that’s a whole other blog post in itself. Reading it through the lens of the pandemic is an experience in itself because the main character is a very physical person, so I vacillated between jealousy and disgust as she touched her way through the story. It’s about a lot of things being a young black American woman, being a young broke millennial, navigating the punishing life of a gig worker, and always feeling like an outsider. Although very different from what I expected it to be, (it was very lyrical, almost like a poem), Luster by Raven Leilani is everything I had hoped for frustrating, disheartening, beautiful and heartbreaking.
I’ve had this book on my shelf for awhile now and I didn’t get to it earlier because of other reading commitments, but I was really excited to finally dive in because a) it’s been getting exceptional reviews and b) I loved another book similar to it, Queenie.
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