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.