Luster by Raven Leilani

 

Edie is working out who she is.  She is living in New York but not exactly thriving.  She is working a dead end job and sharing a roach infested apartment with a roommate she never sees.  Her social life is a series of sexual encounters, both at work and with men she meets in bars or online.  She used to paint but doesn't anymore.  Edie is drifting and she knows it, but doesn't know how to change.

Her most recent man is Eric.  He works in the city and at night returns to his wife, who is a pathologist and the black teenager, Akila, they have adopted.  Edie and Eric have the beginnings of a relationship and when Edie loses her job and her apartment, Eric's wife, agrees to Edie moving in and helping there. The wife seems unsure about how she feels about Edie; distant and rejecting one moment, going to a concert with her or buying Edie paints the next.  Akila becomes attached to Edie as she is the only other black person she sees, her adoptive parents and her classmates being white.  But is this a step forward for Edie or just another misstep?

This is Raven Leilani's debut novel and it echoes her own life.  She was born and raised in New York and thought she would be an artist as art was her early passion.  She studied under authors such as Zadie Smith, Jonathan Safran Foer and Katie Kitamura.  This novel won several prizes such as the Kirkus Prize and the Center For Fiction First Novel Prize.  Leilani captures the aimlessness of a young person realizing that their life is theirs to make of it what they will and that they are responsible for the choices they make.  Readers will by turns be frustrated and cheer for Edie as she stumbles towards what she wants to make of her life.  This book is recommended for literary fiction readers.