Luster by Raven Leilani
Title: Luster
Author: Raven Leilani
Published: 2020
Rating: ⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑
“I look into the mirror and reassure myself that there are bigger things than the moment I am in.”
What a book. I’m not even sure where to begin with this one. I have been excited to read Luster since it came out last August. Although the mixed reviews on this novel truthfully made me a bit shaky on the front end, I am so glad they didn’t deter me from picking this book up. I adored this novel. The writing style was so unique and strange that I could not put it down. Edie is this complex, witty, dark-humored character that seems to evolve in character and yet stay stagnant in her mannerisms throughout the whole story. This novel is first-person, but Edie seems detached from her own life in a way that reads somewhere between first-person and third omniscient. The situation that Edie finds herself in, this bizarre romantic encounter with a man twenty years her senior in the midst of an open marriage, is only further complicated when Edie is evicted and begins to live with Eric and his wife Rebecca, as well as their adopted daughter.
Something that many of these reviews don’t note is how important a role Rebecca plays in Edie’s story. She, over the course of the novel, becomes in my opinion a much broader and more important character than Eric. She serves so many roles to Edie that she has been lacking in her young life, and I think her character shoulders more of the plot than many summaries let on.
A quick note…
Let me say: this isn’t a novel I’d recommend to anyone and everyone. I think the writing style could be dry for some, and there are a couple of tiny plot aspects that seem to slip between the cracks if you graze a sentence or two. There is some reading between the lines here. But I would really recommend this to anyone who wanted to venture outside their literary comfort zone; it was unlike anything I’ve read in the past. The complex topics of race and generational gaps are breached in a way that flows easily with the narrative.
