SEE ALSO: August Reads: The 5 Most Anticipated Books Debuting This MonthĮdie is stunned to discover that this very white and unhappy couple have an adopted Black twelve-year-old daughter, Akila. “Her detachment, the distance between who we see and how she comports herself in public-sex is a great way to collapse that-but there are moments this separation exists because she cares so much, in an ugly, uncool way.” “I think because I wrote in first person, from the point of view of a Black woman, the dissonance between her interior life and exterior performance can read purely as irony,” she says.

Edie ignores every single one of these conditions, and by doing so, ends up being invited to stay with the family in New Jersey.Ĭorresponding with Observer over email, Leilani shares that Edie’s caring and yearning was the starting point. Before they have sex, he pulls out a piece of paper, upon which are jotted the rules of the game, drawn up by his wife, Rebecca. And yet, despite this hyper-awareness, we meet her at a dead-end, thankless job, at which she has disgraced herself, she says, by becoming “the office slut.” We watch her, agonizingly, as she enters into a relationship with a middle-aged white man, Eric, who has just opened his marriage. Edie has a deep curiosity and roguish, devastating insight about the world––nothing escapes her eye. And if what we care about can only exist in our mind, how does life unfold? In Raven Leilani’s hilarious and very moving debut, Luster, the protagonist is Edie, a young Black woman whose overwhelming desire to live and love is met with abject resistance.

Lustre raven leilani