Raven LeilaniRezensionen

Based on his liberal use of the semicolon, I just assumed this date would go well.

That line is perfectly attuned for my reading enjoyment, I must say. It comes in a strong opening part of the novel, in which our narrator Edie makes wry, amusing comments on her burgeoning relationship with an older married man and her soul killing work life. Unfortunately the man in question turns out to be less promising than his frequent use of semicolons suggests; Edie makes a go of it however.

Except, for him, this seems to be new territory. Not simply to be out on a date with someone who is not his wife and decades younger, but to be out with a girl who happens to be black. I can feel it in how cautiously he says African American. How he absolutely refuses to say the word black.

I enjoyed the unexpected swerve this novel takes when Eric's wife invites Edie to move into their house after she gets evicted from her apartment. Eric fades into the background and this uncertain, quite strange, and oddly touching relationship between the two women takes over the story. Eric and his wife Rebecca are liberal white New Yorkers (who live in Jersey) though Rebecca has a harder edge to her than Eric, as gotten across pretty darn on the nose when she takes Edie to a punk/metal show and they thrash in the mosh pit. She's open enough to allow her husband a girlfriend and invite that girlfriend into her house, but yet has an older, no-nonsense style to her as well, as befits her job as a medical examiner (really, does it get any more no-nonsense than a medical examiner?). She does lots of yoga, and tells her husband "That isn't intersectional feminism, it's bad parenting."

Edie is an amusing and smart narrator but for my money Rebecca is the most interesting character. We can all agree I think that Eric is drawn to be a nothing, a limp foil, someone of whom Edie can say, "I think of all the gods I have made out of feeble men." I actually thought this novel was going to make another huge swerve there at the end, but, lol, no.

Shit, the end knocked the wind right out of me.

Leilani’s writing is tactile and lonely and smart. Also a little desolate, and tired, and funny. But smart most of all, I think.

Such beautiful prose and deft observations. Would love to read more from Leilani.

A really interesting but challenging read. This is one Imma have to sit with for a while, to digest. Disturbing and compelling, raw and insightful. Recommended if you're open to something more difficult.

Toppenbok som verkligen tog mig med överraskning. Historien spretar åt alla håll, på ett bra sätt, och karaktärerna är precis så utflippade att det funkar. Mycket bra!

Whoa.

Despite stunning writing, this story about a young African American woman having a relationship with a married older white man, is not only disturbing but uninvolving. Unless you enjoy beautiful composed long sentences filled with juicy metaphors you might want to skip this book.

edie’s (the main character) voice is so candid and refreshing. this sort of crude, matter-of-fact, almost disinterested first person narration of being a young twenty-something reminds me of miranda july’s writing, but this definitely felt more substantial than july’s writing (whose themes, in my opinion, often teeter between abstraction and profundity but never actually make the leap towards profundity). basically the writing is unique and good, the characters feel real, and i recommend it!

Interesting style and story, but I wasn’t as wowed by the writing as many others are. I’m kind of over books about 20-somethings making edgy poor sexual decisions, maybe hits too close to home for me and my own old writing. Plot was not quite believable. I most liked the parts where Edie was connecting with the daughter. 2.5 stars rounded down, I think.

I dunno, I thought this was fascinating. As much as I've been off the 20-something coming of age arts grad in a publishing job subgenre, I still found this valuable. I appreciate getting to sit in the thoughts of a character so different from myself and see their choices from the inside.

I won this in a giveaway. It was sooo good. Once I picked this up, I couldn’t stop. It’s crazy, fun, and I got so sucked in.

DNF at 62%, because the relationship (already at conflict with what I want to read) became violent in a deliberate, desired way. So, some readers will appreciate it. But I'm not one of them.

I'm a bit sad, though. The voice in this novel is AMAZING.

Plot:
Edie is in her 20s and a bit of a mess. She isn’t bad at her job as an editorial assistant, but she’s also not terribly invested and feels that her firing is only a matter of time. Especially since another Black woman was hired who hasn’t earned the reputation as the office slut. She has a relationship with Eric who is twice her age, white and married, albeit in a kind of open marriage. Edie finds herself intrigued by Eric’s family. First his white wife Rebecca, then she realizes that they have a Black adopitve daughter, Akila. And when Edie suddenly doesn’t have anyone to turn to anymore, she turns to them.

Luster is a beautifully written debut novel about a lost, and not always particularly likeable young woman. It is also very much about going through life as a Black woman. I found it both touching and insightful, and also a little strange in the best ways.

Read more on my blog: https://kalafudra.com/2022/10/08/luster-raven-leilani/½

In this book, a troubled African American woman in her 20's, struggles with work and relationships after a troubled childhood. She is an artist and thinks that she is probably not good enough. She ends up in a relationship with an older, white, married man; and ends up moving in with him, his wife, and their adopted African American daughter.

The writing is fine, pretty literary. I could never understand what the protagonist saw in the older white man; and spent most of the book wanting to send her to therapy.

So definitely not my favorite book! I'd probably compare to Sally Rooney, whose books I also dislike.

This book is reviewed in a blog post at https://booksbeyondbinaries.blog/2020/12/07/what-a-year-in-review/

This book made me both laugh out loud and drop my jaw for similar and different reasons, often without realizing it. There were a couple of seemingly obscure details, like a reference to Judith and Holofernes, which I just saw in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence this month, and what I'm pretty sure was an allusion to the first season of the anime Attack on Titan, of which I watched the first episode against my will during lockdown. These details made me feel either like I was kindred spirits with the narrator, like I wasn't alone in the universe, or like I'm just also a millennial child of the internet. Stylistically, I'm a big fan of phrasing that doesn't follow prescriptive patterns, and basically every single sentence in this book was arranged in an entirely new and original way. This made it a little bit of a dense read, not to mention the gritty subject matter, but "it was amazing" anyway, as the five-star review indicates. This is tied for my favorite read of November.

Did Not Finish. I know this book has its fans. Maybe I'm just too old to appreciate a book that is all about sex and violence involving people that have no redeeming value. Just couldn't continue listening to it!

Propulsive, but definitely not a book for the prudish.

Raven Leilani’s caustically witty novel, Luster, is the story of 23-year-old Edie, a chronically broke black woman leading an edgy, messy, sexually and emotionally chaotic existence in contemporary New York City. Edie, trained as an artist, works as an editor in the children’s book division of a publishing house. When we meet her, she is involved in an online flirtation with Eric, a white archivist twice her age. For their first date he takes her to an amusement park. They begin meeting regularly, but it’s weeks before they have sex. And it turns out that Eric’s wife knows about the affair. Eric informs Edie that it’s fine with Rebecca as long as they abide by Rebecca’s rules (one of which is that the rules can change without warning). The oddness of everything about her relationship with Eric occupies Edie’s thoughts but, as we soon realize is her habit, she just shrugs and goes along with it. When Edie is fired from her job (for being “sexually inappropriate”), she finds work with a delivery app, but the money is insufficient to live on and she is briefly homeless. When Eric stops contacting her and doesn’t respond to her messages, Edie turns up at his suburban home—impulsively she walks in, and there is Rebecca. Later, at Rebecca’s invitation (while Eric is out of town), she moves in with the couple and their adopted pre-teen daughter, Akila, who is black. Edie suspects Rebecca of wanting to use her “blackness” as an emotional and cultural salve for her daughter, expecting Edie to understand and cater to Akila’s needs in ways that her adoptive parents are unable to, an assumption that Edie finds preposterous, amusing and vaguely insulting. And still, she forms a bond with the girl that becomes meaningful, tender and mutually supportive. Leilani’s novel is intensely physical—Edie, uncomfortable in her own skin, is always aware of her body as a sexual object and the effect it has on men and other women. Yet, throughout the book she is consumed by ambivalence toward her body, which, as circumstances evolve, she regards variously as an advantage, an inconvenience and a burden. The novel is largely concerned with black Edie navigating a path through a white person’s world, trying “to take up as little space as possible,” but attracting unwanted attention nonetheless. In the end, she seems to find solace and redemption in her art, the power and precision of which enable her to capture, define and control an off-kilter universe rife with inequities that can be confusing, hostile and cruel. Luster fascinates for a number of reasons: the startling and sometimes unfathomable behaviour of its characters, its courageous dissection of racial and sexual politics, its meandering, zig-zagging plot that generates, if not suspense exactly, then a weird sort of tension or energy not completely unrelated to it. Most captivating though is Raven Leilani’s prose, which is minutely observant, engagingly sardonic, and lively with detail and cultural references that bring Edie’s shifting states of mind vividly, sometimes painfully, into focus. In a sense, Luster’s flaws are also its strengths, because the book requires the reader to abandon any preconceptions and give him/herself over to it completely. Some readers won’t want to do this, but those who do will find the experience invigorating, illuminating and deeply rewarding.

Laughed out loud, doesnt hold punches, informal and times yet beautiful and powerful writing. guts people for who they are

Edie is self destructive and difficult to understand, but very compelling. She is a black woman on her own, and so very very young. I was glad for the glimmer of hope at the end that she might actually be able to take some control of her life.

Given the premise and the title, I thought that Luster would be a sexy book, but it isn't. Instead, it is a literary examination of the triangle that develops among a black would-be artist, her white lover, and his white wife. When the artist loses her day job, she ends up living with her lover's family, which also includes a black foster child. New relationships form, and others die out.

It is Edie the artist's witty narrative voice that makes this otherwise solemn book worth reading.½

Luster is a novel about so many things and yet about nothing specific at all. A young black woman, largely a loser, hooks up with an older white man and eventually ends up living with his family in a leafy suburb. I read it mostly as being the woman, lost to herself, finding her muses in the most unlikely of places. It's also about sex, race, and isolation.

The fist half was entirely irritating to me. Largely because I wanted to slap Edie for being such a stupid loser. Later, her family backstory softened me a bit. But the issue is that the narrative voice is Edie, but somehow, a more mature, omniscient, and articulate Edie. An Edie that shouldn't be the stupid loser who drinks vodka at work and can't remember to pay her bills. By the end of the novel she has tranformed into the narrator, though in retrospect that is entirely unbelievable.

I appreciate that this is a very gritty, raw novel that goes places many will not. It's daring and I suspect memorable.½

I hated this book. In our time of coronavirus and hyper-partisan politics it came at me viciously using long sentences steeped in the cultural vernacular of a person fifty years younger than I, filled with references I didn’t understand, and the righteous anger of a young black woman struggling to find her place personally and professionally in a society that judges her based on her blackness and her gender and little else.
I loved this book. The driving force of Edie’s narration, her unique personality, viewpoint and language, slowly won me over, although it took time. By the last quarter of the book I was mesmerized by her inability to overcome her own choices while persevering as if she could. I was overcome with a sense of pre-ordained doom. I hoped for an epiphany. I savored every word, researched every confusing cultural reference. Because of the way Leilani builds this story and Edie’s character, the ending was satisfying for me, although I can’t tell you why.

Edie, the mid-twenties protagonist narrates in the first person, sometimes with a nearly stream-of-consciousness style that is immediate but difficult for me because it is steeped in the culture of her age group–forty-five years distant from mine. The challenges of Edie’s life, the way she lives it, and the cultural milieu she lives it in are not mine–she is an artist, I was an engineer; she is a passionate, young black woman, I am an older white man; I am privileged in many subtle ways, she is not. She is automatically suspect–by the police, by her employers, by the people she meets–I am automatically trusted.
Those differences are the theme, for me. Leilani had to bludgeon me with it and she almost knocked me out, but I withstood her blows and was given a small window into this life I will never know. I felt viscerally what it was like to be Edie, living with and acknowledging her faults and reveling in her fortitude and her insight.
I read a lot science fiction partly to feel the presence of the other and experience worlds I will never know. Raven Leilani, in Luster has given me the best of that in the familiar setting of my own world, but with a perspective alien to me–that of a young, black woman.

Well written

Every generation of 20-somethings thinks their situation is somehow unique. As they come to grips with being adults, how working can be a real drag, how it's harder for them. This book is the Gen Z version--Edie is among the oldest of Gen Z.

Edie lives in a crappy apartment, works a boring publishing job, and wants to paint. She makes bad decisions day in and day out--mostly involving 1) men, but also her involving her 2) career, her 3) art, her 4) friends. She loses her job due to 1 and 2, loses her apartment, and ends up in an unusual living situation. Her boyfriend is older and married and presents her with his wife's rules for their relationship. She breaks them.

As she looks for a new job via online postings, she struggles to find where she fits. As a black woman, she is often not taken seriously (but really--she is not serious about work) in the interview process. She gets to know a black tween who has been adopted by a white family, and Edie finally finds a bit of a purpose--to teach this girl about life as a black woman. About her hair, how to behave around cops, how to exist in the world. But Akila teaches Edie things too.

Maybe I would have liked this book a lot more if I were a current 20-something. I did love Edie's biting humor and sarcasm. She is witty and bright, smart and funny.