“I think of how keenly I’ve been wrong. I think of all the gods I have made out of feeble men.”
Over the past few years, literary fiction has been treated to the emergence of a new subgenre: women on the verge of collapse. Isolated protagonists drifting through toxic relationships, dead-end jobs, emotional numbness, and self-destruction in search of meaning. Raven Leilani’s Luster firmly sits within this space, serving up a fresh lens through the perspective of a young black millennial woman navigating loneliness, class, sex, and identity in modern America. Equal parts darkly funny, painfully awkward, and sharply observant, the novel blends biting social commentary with lyrical prose that often feels uncomfortably close to real life. Join us at What We Reading for our Luster book review to find out more about Raven Leilani’s debut novel, and whether this latest woman-wronged story is worth adding to your TBR pile!
Date Published: 2020
Author: Raven Leilani
Genre: Fiction, Literary Fiction
Pages: 227
Goodreads Rating: 3.50/5
Luster Summary
Edie is just trying to survive. She’s messing up her dead-end admin job in her all-white office, is sleeping with all the wrong men, and has failed at the one thing that ever gave her any purpose: 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 help her with 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 headfirst into Eric’s home and family. Razor-sharp, provocatively page-turning, and surprisingly tender, Luster is a painfully funny debut novel by Raven Leilani about what it means to be young now.
What Worked
One of the things I admired most about Luster was how it recontextualises the increasingly popular “woman wronged” or “female unravelling” tropes we’re seeing everywhere these days through the lens of a young black millennial woman. While the novel shares some thematic DNA with My Year of Rest and Relaxation – especially in its depiction of alienation, self-destruction, and emotional detachment – Raven Leilani grounds Luster in a very different social reality.
Edie’s loneliness is inseparable from her identity. The novel’s commentaries on race, class, age, and power dynamics quietly shape each and every interaction she has, lending another layer to her sense of displacement. Instead of making these themes feel heavy-handed, Leilani allows them to emerge gradually through awkward encounters, microaggressions, failed intimacy, and the quiet humiliations that follow us all in modern life.
I also really appreciated the book’s commentaries on performative liberalism. It would have been easy for Luster to lean more into overt or exaggerated racial commentaries, but instead Leilani frames the story through the subtler discomfort of existing around supposedly progressive people whose biases still seep through in quieter, more authentic ways. That nuance made the social observations feel sharper and more true to life.
Leilani’s writing style was another huge plus in Luster. Her prose juggles lyrical, almost poetic introspection with biting social satire and genuinely funny observations about modern relationships, sex, work, and identity. There were multiple times where I found myself laughing at lines that felt totally absurd on the surface, yet still stuck to the novel’s broader themes of loneliness and alienation.
What Didn’t
With that being said, Luster never quite hit me with the same emotional punch that other books in this corner of the literary world have done. Perhaps that distance was intentional, or maybe the novel just wasn’t “for” me; however, despite appreciating what Leilani was doing thematically, I never really connected with Edie on a deeper level.
I understood her loneliness, frustrations, and alienation intellectually, and Leilani ensures she remains sympathetic even at her messiest, most self-destructive moments, but there were times in Luster where Edie’s inner life felt obscured behind the book’s dense, highly lyrical prose.
A lot of Luster is built around observations rather than emotional directness: Edie notices, comments, dissects, and intentionally reframes the world around her, often leaving us readers to work out between the lines what she really feels. This ambiguity works for large stretches of the book, but it does leave me feeling like I never really understood her in a way I have with other protagonists in other works.
There’s a serious lack of any meaningful development in Luster and its characters. I don’t mind unlikeable characters – in fact, the novel is clearly structured around messy, contradictory people – but many of the relationships begin to feel emotionally static over time. Characters drift in and out of bizarre interactions without any feeling of progression or transformation, which eventually led to me feeling like Leilani just didn’t really know where to go with them.
Rebecca is perhaps the best example of this. While her strange dynamic with Edie is fascinating, there were points where her actions felt more symbolically provocative rather than emotionally grounded.
There was also the whole “dog-shooting subplot,” which feels like a bizarre, unnecessary add-on.
Verdict
Overall, Luster is an intelligent, sharply observant novel that succeeds most in its atmosphere, voice, and social commentary. Raven Leilani brings a fresh perspective to the increasingly familiar “woman unravelling” narrative, grounding Edie’s isolation and alienation within broader conversations about race, class, sexuality, and performative progressivism in ways that feel nuanced and painfully believable. Her prose is often hilarious, lyrical, and uncomfortably perceptive all at once.
At the same time, the novel’s emotional distance occasionally stopped me from really connecting with its characters, and its loose, meandering structure does sometimes leave the story feeling underdeveloped rather than intentionally ambiguous. Nevertheless, Luster is a genuinely good book – compelling, darkly funny and a breeze to get through. It might not have completely fulfilled its potential for me, but it was still good fun to spend time with.
Rating: 3.5/5
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Part-time reader, part-time rambler, and full-time Horror enthusiast, James has been writing for What We Reading since 2022. His earliest reading memories involved Historical Fiction, Fantasy and Horror tales, which he has continued to take with him to this day. James’ favourite books include The Last (Hanna Jameson), The Troop (Nick Cutter) and Chasing The Boogeyman (Richard Chizmar).
