Thanks to Penguin Random House Canada's Bond Street Books and NetGalley for the opportunity to read a digital ARC of "Luster" by Raven Lelani.

As soon as I received approval to read Luster in July, I started reading the book. I was excited to read the book based on its premise – a young Black woman loses her job, moves in with her married White boyfriend, his wife, who has agreed to an open marriage with rules, and Akila, their adopted teenaged Black daughter. I thought, "Wow," this may be an exciting story. Now, what can I say about this novel? Luster tells the story of Edie, a 21-year-old artist, her exploits with men, degradation, relationships with others, and growth. The author's description of Edie's Brunswick apartment with roaches crawling around is a metaphor for her life. She scurries from man to man, person to person, and takes any crumbs they give her. Edie is a scavenger who takes and takes and debases herself. I never understood why Edie would engage in a relationship with Eric, a (white) married man, his wife, Rebecca, or Akila, their adopted Black teenage daughter. I was perplexed and kept trying to understand why Rebecca allowed Edie, who invited herself into their house, to stay; or why Eric didn't kick her out. I realized they had an open marriage with rules, but it didn't make sense since Rebecca was not happy with this arrangement. Was Edie moving into this household inhabited by a Black adopted daughter a plot device? I thought the teenaged Akila had more sense, awareness, and insight on life than Eric, Rebecca, and especially Edie.

I read the book in its entirety and didn't care much for any of the characters. It was uncomfortable reading this book, but I'm glad the author resolved this saga with Edie leaving Eric's household (with prompting), starting to see some value in her life, and deciding to focus on her art. Edie and Eric were a bit too daring and immoral for me. I pondered for weeks over this book before writing this review because I wanted to give a fair assessment. I also weighed the impact of her childhood experiences on her adult life. Luster may be a bold, provocative story, but unfortunately, it was a bit too much for me.

Thank you to FSG and NetGalley for a free digital copy of Luster in exchange for an honest review.

Luster follows the story of Brooklyn-resident Edie who is in her early 20s, and like most of us in our early 20s, making a lot of poor choices. When she starts dating Eric, a much older white man who is an open marriage, she finds her life becoming more and more entwined in his family's as she meets his wife Rebecca and daughter Akila.

I would classify this book as repulsive realism, which is a genre I tend to gravitate toward. Edie is a well-developed, highly flawed character, which means she's very real. I have seen other readers comment they want to give her a hug. And yes, Edie desperately needs a hug and a group of friends outside of Eric and his family. Edie is the type of character to get easily confused with her creator, and while Leilani acknowledges there are parts of her in this book, it is still fiction. Luster reminds you of all the parts of your 20s that really suck - navigating your job that's not yet a career, dating terrible men, figuring out how to sustain relationships, making time to be creative and find joy, and constantly feeling broke.

Leilani also writes poetry, and her prose has a poetic quality to it. There are many beautiful passages that I read twice. Luster is slim, but it felt longer than 227 pages. I'm not sure why it felt that way other than there's a lot that happens in a short amount of pages and it can be hard to read about a character that doesn't seem to get a lot of "wins." But I highly recommend picking this one up, if only to remind yourself of how glad you are to no longer be 23.

This was an extraordinarily crafted character study and I LOVED IT. I almost feel as if I could start it again from the beginning and experience something equally remarkable but utterly different. There were parts where the writing was so precise and exquisite that I could just about taste or see or smell exactly what was being described. Other parts were so viscerally uncomfortable I had to pause and take a deep breath before continuing on. The buzz is absolutely deserved in this case and I highly and without reservation recommend.

A thank you to NetGalley for sharing the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This is an exceptionally difficult book to review because I cannot boil my feelings down to a simple 'like' or 'dislike' as Luster is definitely one for the books. First, it bears noting that the prudish or sexually inhibited (probably) need not apply as it's slightly unsettling for even the most sexually liberated. It's not the perfectly rendered sexual moments that engender discomfort, however, but rather the sheer vulnerability of the main character who wields her sexuality as both a weapon and a means of self-flagellation. And, so, while you may questions her decisions, you can't help but to empathize with her and hope that she ultimately learns to own her own worth. The emotional appeal of the inarguably young protagonist is one of the primary appeals of this novel. The other is the writing, which is, in a word, sublime. Nary a word is wasted - so crisp and so refreshing that reading it is akin to taking a bite of the perfect apple. A must read for those in search of titillating literary fiction and those who seek novels that speak to cultural consciousness and feminist awareness.

Luster is about a young woman, Edie, who finds herself in a bit of a conundrum, living in the home of her married lover Eric, his wife Rebecca and their adopted daughter Akila after a job loss and home eviction. Yes, there is no denying that to the reader Edie's life is a hot mess but I still wonder whose life isn't when we are allowed brutal unlimited access to their inner thoughts, deepest insecurities, darkest secrets, sexual exscapades and for me the ugliness is sometimes where the beauty lays. Edie is an observer of the world, someone who takes note of any and everything, an old soul. She is also deeply flawed looking for something using physical pain as a substitute for emotional pain. Great literature always has the reader asking "What the hell are you doing?" And I must admit, I asked that question while reading Luster. As broken as Edie is she is not delusional and knows her flaws but the question is whether or not she wants tomake any improvements to her life or maybe she does not think she has to. I love that the characters are smart and that they have careers and don't simply live for the next encounter. All of their jobs or persuit of one made Edie, Rebecca, and Eric interesting and fully developed characters. Luster is not always serious, droll humor is the best way to describe the comical and self depreciating moments in this book. Some will say that Luster has its slow moments, and it does mostly because it written in a the stream of consciousness format, which means we only get Edie's perspective, but it is in those pedestrian moments, also known as real life, Leilani drops some important facts about the people who played a pivital role on Edie's life, such as her first lover and her lack of parental guidance. Overall, I truly enjoyed Luster, it was dense, witty, poignant and sharply executed. This was a five star read for me not because it didn't have flaws but because I felt it captured the beauty and banality of everyday life from young Black woman's perspective.

I’m not quite sure what I just read! Incredibly cringeworthy but also unputdownable. I read this in a single sitting. Race, sex, parenthood, victimhood and the modern age.

“I am good, but not good enough, which is worse than simply being bad. It is almost. The difference between being there when it happens and stepping out just in time to see it on the news.”

This book struck a chord in me, in ways I wasn’t expected. Luster is about loneliness, about wanting to make your mark on the world but not really knowing how. All the characters are complex, imperfect, and prime to be disliked. But in seeing all their flaws and learning what made them, you grow to appreciate them for their realism.

Edie’s relationship with Eric is how she becomes entangled with Rebecca—his wife—and Akila—their adoptive daughter. But it is really Edie’s relationship with this woman and girl that I found more powerful and transformative than her relationship with Eric. Through these women, you see Edie’s own uncertainties, and perhaps a reflection of who she could have been and who she could become.

The theme of Edie’s art throughout was also an interesting way to explore her own personal growth. She uses her painting as a way to learn about herself, to figure out how to make her lasting impression on the world.

Leilani artfully weaves together all the things that a 20-something Black girl might be anxious about: her weight, her looks, whether this man likes her, how she will support herself, how racism will affect her, what her future is going to be like. Her writing is gorgeous and I found myself highlighting phrase after phrase as I read. This is a quiet book, packed with lots of emotions and Edie’s internal dialogue. It is definitely one to pick up.

Huge thanks to FSG for the advance Netgalley and the finished print copy of this book, in exchange for an honest review (pub date Aug 4, 2020). And another thanks to Greenlight Bookstore for the wonderful launch event, featuring the author in conversation with the inimitable Samantha Irby--

WOW. Sometimes a debut book lands with a new voice at the exact right time. That's Raven Leilani's Luster in a nutshell: "And the truth is that when the officer had his arm pressed into my neck, there was a part of me that felt like, all right. Like, fine. Because there will always be a part of me that is ready to die."

Luster follows a young 23-year-old Black woman named Edie whose life is a complete mess: awful cockroach-filled apartment in Bushwick, terrible underpaid publishing job where she's tokenized, strained relationships with her parents who are both deceased, constant casual sex as a way to feel something. Edie's really a visual artist, but she struggles to take herself seriously. Then she loses the apartment, the job--everything.

But then there's Eric: a white middle-aged digital archivist from New Jersey. His wife has agreed to an open marriage (with RULES), so Edie starts a relationship with him. Then, she ends up living in his suburban house in a super white neighborhood. OH AND: Eric and his wife have an adopted Black daughter, who has no Black women in her daily life. So, Edie can sleep with Eric, and live in his house with his wife, and "teach" his daughter about how to be Black, right? WHAT...THE...F?

This book is so wild and awkward and strange. It's a perfect encapsulation of how capitalist white patriarchal society grinds down young women--particularly young Black women. Leilani's sentences are gorgeous, packed with both heartbreak and humor, no matter whether she's talking about abortion or IBS. And she nails that first-person present-tense POV (big props, as someone who is also writing a novel in that perspective, because it isn't easy). Read this one.

Stunning debut. Sharp, funny and emotional and sure to resonate with young folks struggling with employment, relationships and race.

Daring. Ugly. Awkward. Necessary. Raw. Honest. Hysterical. Smart. Unconstrained.

These are all words I’d use to describe Luster, the debut novel by Raven Leilani.
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Based on his liberal use of the semicolon, I just assumed this date would go well. - Edie
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Leilani’s writing is a revelation. I highlighted so many lines and passages in this book that I have to include a few here. Luster is Edie's first-person stream-of-consciousness account what t's like to be a struggling 23-year-old Black woman trying make her way. She almost reminds me of a modern-day Bridget Jones if she were a younger WOC living in Brooklyn in 2020.
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I almost lose a seat to a woman who gets on at Union Square, but luckily her pregnancy slows her down. - Edie
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Edie’s life isn’t necessarily going the way she’d hoped - her Bushwick apartment is infested with mice, she half-asses her job in children’s publishing while dreaming of becoming an artist, and has IBS. When she becomes involved in with Eric, who is 23 years older than she is, married and white, her already off-kilter world really starts to spiral, landing her in the most unlikely place - taken in by Eric’s wife, Rebecca, literally (she moves into their New Jersey guest room) and figuratively when she becomes a friend and mentor to Eric and Rebecca’s adopted black daughter and an ally to the woman whose husband she’s sleeping with.
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I think of all the gods I have made out of feeble men. - Edie
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Edie can be frustrating. She self-sabotages constantly which makes you want to shake some sense into her but as you learn more about why, you want to wrap her in a big hug. Leilani’s descriptive prose and her unpredictable storytelling keeps you on your toes as a reader - I never knew what might happen next - and she doesn’t shy away from life’s ugliness.
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There are times I interact with kids and recall my abortion fondly, moments like this when I cross paths with a child who is clearly a drag.- Edie
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I learned a lot from Edie and her experiences as a young black woman and I won’t soon forget this daring, vivid and exhilarating book. I can’t wait to read whatever Leilani writes next.


Thank you to NetGalley, Farrar Straus & Giroux and the author for an advanced ecopy of the novel to review.

3.5 stars.
This was, once I got into it, a relatively compelling read that at times felt held back by the constructed aloofness of the main character. Having had many a novel about twenty-something white women engaging in destructive relationships pressed on me and found them wanting, reading Edie's experiences as a Black woman navigating similar spaces and relationships made for a more considered take on a genre that has often left me cold.

The book really started to grab me once Edie and Rebecca met and it is their relationship -- in all its pushes and pulls -- and their tensions regarding Akila that I found ultimately most engaging. Edie's almost unwilling tenderness to Akila is also really well drawn. I found the ways in which she sees herself in Akila poised against Akila's real sense of self a particularly effective approach to a relationship that ought, by rights, to be filled with greater tension. I particularly enjoyed the moments where Leilani really explores Edie's halted and healing relationship with her own art.

What is frustrating about this book is that I felt it didn't entirely commit to any of the emotional or relationship strands it sets up. Edie's relationship with Eric is, for me, the least interesting part of the book and while Eric's two-dimensionality hardly bothers me, the surface level engagement with Edie's relationship with violent desire as explored through Eric felt half-hearted.

In many ways, I expected more of the relationship with Edie and Rebecca and felt a bit like this plotline ran out of steam precisely when it oughtn't. At the same time though, I suppose this reflects the way that life rarely follows neat plot turns and timelines.

Edie's emotional detachment does a lot to help depict this character who's been held in traumatic stasis, although this isn't always an enjoyable narrative experience, I did appreciate what this was doing structurally.

All in all, I wished at times for a little more depth and perhaps a greater commitment to deepening or extending these relationships but, perhaps their transience and Edie's wavering ability to connect is the point.

This is one of those books that is so hard to me to review. I appreciate the excellence in the writing, but the content is definitely not to my taste, and the main character is so incredibly unlikeable that my first reaction was to give it a much lower rating. But instead I thought about it for a bit, read an interview the author gave to Kirkus and decided to give it the rating it deserves.
This book is getting a lot of buzz and excellent reviews, so I think the best thing to do is read it for yourself .
It would make a wonderful book club choice because I imagine everyone will have a opinion!

The word that comes to mind when I think about this novel is manic. The narrative was all over the place and the characters were extremely unlikable. I felt like I was talking myself into finishing the book throughout the entire time I was reading. There's no doubt that the author is a good writer, but it's all just thrown together into a sporadic, depressing heap of self deprecating internal monologue.

There’s so much to say about this wonderful debut, from it’s no-holds barred careening through the early-twenties perspective of Edie, a young Black woman in her early twenties whose narrative opens with a series of “sexy times in the workplace” encounters at a publishing house. She seems to stumble from unemployment into the fulcrum of an open marriage, becoming embedded in the life of the couple and their adopted daughter.
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While the plot itself makes for a wildly captivating read, what really grabbed my attention early on (and from reviews I’m reading, i’m definitely not alone here!) was the prose and Leilani’s ability to imbue so much in each sentence. Her observations and narrative style were viscerally literal at times, providing little respite or levity for Edie, while simultaneously carrying an incredible depth in the broader commentary. For example, in describing her grandmother—“walking proof of American industry, the bolls and ships and casual sexual terrorism that put a little cream in the coffee and made her family loyal to the almighty paper bag.”
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I loved the way that art and it’s creation was used in the narrative—from commentary about the artwork on a wall in a hospital during a moment of extreme trauma, to the way Edie mixes paints and this creative process that is fueled or hindered by what is going on in her life, to the way it becomes a communicative language for Edie to describe her feelings about other characters. It was stunning to see this paralleled against the primary narrative, and how much it drew out the complexities in how racism and sexism and violence and trauma were written.
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There’s so much to unpack and discuss in this, I’ve loved reading reviews and hearing what other readers have taken from this. Many thanks to FSG for gifting me this (and the gorgeous nail elixir!)

Oh the twenties. I hated my twenties. I had no idea of what I wanted or how to figure it out. This story is beautiful in it's way that showcases the many mistakes we commit and how she's trying to figure it out as she goes along. Very well written with strong characters. Happy reading!

LUSTER...... Had me in all my feels.... JUST WOW! After reading the summary I was very inrtigued on how an open marriage worked. I WAS INTRIGUED BY THE OPEN MARRIAGE PART!!!! SERIOUSLY???? Anyway, this book is OOOOO MY GOOODNESS good! A Raw addictive read that is just jaw dropping good.

Often times, I feel Debut novels can be a hit or miss. Even with this one, I felt... Hmm... I am not sure this book will depict a story line about open marriage as well as it should be written. But, once I dove into this story. I COULDN"T STOP.

Meet Edie, A black woman in her 20's employed by a publishing company,who's life is utterly a mess. One bad decision leads to another and so on. She Meets Eric.

Meet Eric, Eric Also works for the publishing company. He is married to a lady named Rebecca... Here is the kicker, They have an open marriage... What does that mean? That means, they are allowed to step out of the marriage to meet their needs within the guidelines mutually laid out by the married couple. When Eric meets Edie is when the story takes place.

Edie seems to be a hot mess, but she is seemingly doing alright... Until everything crashes down. Edie finds herself broke and no job. They only people she can turn to is the couple who she might not want to get to close too. She finds herself mixed up in an open marriage and now mixed up in the suburban home of the open marriage couple that she is involved with. Little did she know just how unhappy the couple is. The couple also has a child who edie grows a close bond too. Can you predict the ending?

What a strong debut novel for Raven, Well developed characters, and a FANTASTIC Unique story line to write about. I can only hope Raven carries this writing style into her next novel! If that happens, I will be back for more Raven Leilani reads!

Thank you to netgalley and Farrer, Straus & Giroux for My ARC Copy in exchange for my honest review!

First, I have to start with a disclaimer. I generally hate books with gross descriptions of sex, and I don't mean explicit, I mean gross as in a bit disgusting. Another two good examples of that are The Pisces, and Paul Takes a Form of A Mortal Girl. Another thing that makes me DNF books a lot is the main character that lives for abusive sex or is entirely fascinated by it. Be it in the romantic sense or enjoy being humiliated and physically assaulted in scenarios outside of what one thinks as a healthy BDSM relationship. So, this is the reason this book is not five stars. However, I kept reading and truly made myself read this slowly so I could highlight every beautiful and insightful sentence on the page.

Leilani is a master of beautiful prose that no one can say otherwise. I found myself annotating this book so often that at one point, it took me an hour just to get through a 24-page chapter because I could not stop writing notes and highlighting. This makes me wish I had a physical copy, just to be able to visualize all the beauty in the text at a glance.

Luster explores the relationship between a young Black woman, who, for the exact fact that we are the same age, made me feel at both times really mature and naive, Edie, with her lover Eric and later on his wife Rebbacca and their adopted daughter Akila.

Edie has not had an easy life with a mother who was a drug addict that died by suicide and a distant and emotionally abusive father. Edie has always been attracted to men who are at least not ideal, and most of the time tend to be just plain wrong. Through the book's development, we see Edie's life fall apart as she loses her job, for being 'sexually inappropriate' and involved with several co-workers and subsequently losing her apartment.

As she becomes more involved with Eric, she also begins to develop a relationship with his cold and almost robotic wife, Rebecca, and their adopted daughter Akila. When Rebecca and Edie meet for the second time, Rebecca invites her to live in their house until she can find a new job and place to live, and it is there that things get both weird and interesting.

When Edie first moves in, Eric is away on business and is unaware of the arrangement Rebecca has. In this brief period, the books become a masterpiece. The relationship between Rebecca and Edie is always at arm's length; both women aware of the nature of their involvement with Eric and how unorthodox that is. But the fact that we can only see things through Edie's perspective tightens the tension a lot more. Rebecca is a cold person, on the surface, a woman who has had her personality curbed by her marriage. Plus, she never wanted to be a mother but decided to adopt because her sterile husband, who most of the time is not home, wanted to be a father. With that in mind, we start seeing the possibility that Edie is being used as a surrogate mother to Akila, the couple's adopted child who happens to be Black, and has lived so far in an entirely white community. Akila was my favorite character, she is complex and brave, and by far the only person who is not trying to pretend to be someone she is not. Even if she is a very self-conscious 13-year-old girl, she rarely takes bullshit and does not take well on the pity and implied notion that she and Edie should have some form of connection because they are both black. Instead, she makes Edie work for her friendship, which we later see is the only healthy relationship in the household.

But let's talk more about Rebecca and Edie, look I spent half of this book wishing they would pull a Thelma and Louise and the other half waiting for something sinister to happen. Neither of it did; instead, Leilani shows you how real life is terrifying in its subtleties. I could see horrific elements of Get Out, the Edie first moves in, and we start to see clearly a commentary on race and fetishization of Women of Color, as well as on the neighbor across the street that keeps watching Edie's every move. Specifically, between Edie and Eric, that although have a consenting relationship seems to be focused on how much power and control and physical and emotional abuse, he can impose on her. With that said, I also kept thinking of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, and Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. The women in these three stories are different; their roles in society are different. But the fact that the storyline fit so beautifully to tell the same story of post-colonial ownership, race, and gender, as things that inhabit being only at the corner of the mind of White male thoughts, but very much at the center of their aggression and lust.

I have gone back and forth on all the imagery and remarkable structure in this novel. The entire mystery and, at the same time, brutal honesty between these women, that don't ever speak plainly with each other but seem to see one another. As if the crazy woman in the attic were to have shared her life with Jane, although if you asked which of the women Rebecca or Edie is, which I would not tell you for sure.

Another remarkable thing I want to point out about my reading of this book is the use of violence, death, and bodies. Rebecca is a medical examiner. When she first meets Edie outside of her house, she immodestly tells the audience everything we have to know about her, even if we don't immodestly see it. She deals with death, with gruesome things, but isn't aroused by them. She does not require that to be part of her relationship with Eric. But she is also into punk rock and takes her clothes off as if her body was never truly exposed. She is plain, but she is not by any means boring. Heck, as I write this, I still wished she would have run away with Edie, even if I never expected them to be romantic. I was so invested in their communication and relationship, that when at the end Eddie has a miscarriage and Rebecca takes care of her, and later helps her move, I never thought for one second that this was strange. The fact that they had developed a secret language and communication was at all unrealistic. They are never friends per se, but they are both trapped in a house and in a life that neither wants to truly be. When it is implied that Rebecca killed the dog, and this leads to the brutal and criminal action of the police in arresting Akila and Edie in front of their house. Edie never asks Rebecca never blames her because, at this point, they both see that there is so much about the other's suffering and rage that they can never understand.

I loved this book, and I cannot wait to see what Raven Leilani does next. This review might have been a bit unstructured, but to me, that shows how much the book accomplished. I still have theories and thoughts, drawing comparisons, and having epiphanies days after reading it. This book might not be for everyone, given the many traumas and violent things on the page. However, Leilani's writing must be read, because the beauty that overcomes such mundane settings and such horrific scenarios and still leaves you in awe, is the highest form of art.

Edie is struggling. At twenty three years old, she’s in a publishing job she’s hardly thrilled with, is having sex with a run of people she feels even less about, and then embarks on an affair with an older married man in an open relationship.She says, “if I’m honest, all of my relationships have been like this, parsing the intent of the jaws that lock around my head. Like, is he kidding or is he hungry? In other words, all of it, even the love, is a violence”.

I mean!

The fact that Edie is black and Eric white initially seems less of a focus than their age difference, until she meets his teenager daughter Akila and suddenly finds herself potentially thrust in a pseudo mentor role by Eric’s wife Rebcca.

So. Much. To. Unpack.

First off, Raven Leilani is a fantastic writer. Like her protagonist her writing is frenetic and hyper smart, and volleys from thought to action and back to alternate thought which leads to opposing or maybe similar action. She has her pulse on literally everything, containing, but not limited to: race, gender, sexuality, sexual violence, suicide and privilege. At times there were so many things coming at you, I found I had to stop and reread certain passages again to get it all. It’s both exciting and exhausting, and people that tap in-which I can certainly imagine many Millennials will, will enter the matrix of her mind and be nodding with recognition and agreement. My only downside to the book was I really wanted to like someone by the end of this. Yes, Edie at times made me laugh, and her observations are incredibly spot on and delivered with wry directness, but I found myself recoiling from one domino drop to another as her decisions and those of Eric and Rebecca seemed to feel steeped in deep rooted pain. This is definitely a book to evoke lots of conversation and I think it could be polarizing. But what is very clear is we’re seen the start of what is sure to be a remarkable career from a hugely talented writer.

Luster by Raven Leilani is one hell of a debut novel. It took a bit of an adjustment on my part to get used to Leilani’s writing style, but once I was in, I was in. I found myself cursing Edie throughout (she reminded me of me at 23 at times...) but she was so well-written that you couldn’t help but want her to come into herself as a young, black woman. I highly recommend this novel to anyone interested in women’s fiction and the like. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this digital ARC.

4.5 stars

This, dear reader, is one heck of a debut novel, and I already eagerly anticipate what Raven Leilani does next.

You may see yourself in Edie. She's 23 and unmoored. She doesn't like her job and wants a promotion, yet she can't muster the energy to put in the work needed to get that promotion. Where she does expend energy is her love life, sleeping with coworkers who should have been left in solely that role. She comes home to a roach-infested apartment that she can't be bothered to clean. She moves through life, letting it happen to her rather than making choices that could help her. For instance, when she wants--needs--to feel something, she chooses pain over emotions that could guide her toward something more whole.

Edie begins seeing Eric, a married man in an open marriage, albeit one with rules written by his wife Rebecca. When she loses her job, Rebecca invites her into Rebecca and Eric's home with the hope that Edie, a Black woman, can help their Black adopted daughter Akila.

I loved being in Edie's head. It isn't always a pleasant place to be, but Raven Leilani challenges you to think more, feel more, consider more. She pursues race and gender issues, showing you gaping disparities. For instance, Edie is judged for her sexual pursuits with coworkers, yet the men are not. Edie is also judged by another Black woman at work, who judges her for her lack of drive. Living with Eric and Rebecca, Edie's role is clear: help our Black daughter find a connection. If only Edie could find a healthy one for herself.

Edie's relationship with Eric is approached with a cold eye. Theirs is a transactional alliance, giving each something they think they need. Eric is as unmoored as Edie, particularly where his marriage is concerned. Whereas she seeks out unhealthy sexual dalliances, he reaches for something perhaps even more toxic. Rebecca, too, has lost her way. An autopsist, she's used to closely examining people and drawing conclusions, yet she can't see the forensics in her marriage.

Parts of this book are caustically hilarious, and others have a bittersweet sheen. You dearly hope that Edie can pull herself out of her morass, and you want to pull Akila close, hoping to shield her from her parents' confusion.

Let me know what you think of this book and if you, too, are a Raven Leilani fan.