Title: Luster
Genre: Contemporary, Fiction, Romance
Format: Paperback
Pages: 240
Published: August 4, 2020
Where I got It: My shelf (gift)
Summary:
Luster sees a young Black woman fall into art and someone else's open marriage. Edie is stumbling her way through her twenties--sharing a subpar apartment in Bushwick, clocking in and out of her admin job, making a series of inappropriate sexual choices. She's also, secretly, haltingly, figuring her way into life as an artist. And then she meets Eric, a digital archivist with a family in New Jersey, including an autopsist wife who has agreed to an open marriage--with rules. As if navigating the constantly shifting landscapes of contemporary sexual manners and racial politics weren't hard enough, Edie finds herself unemployed and falling into Eric's family life, his home. She becomes a hesitant friend to his wife and a de facto role model to his adopted daughter. Edie is the only Black woman who young Akila knows.Razor-sharp, darkly comic, sexually charged, socially disruptive, Luster is a portrait of a young woman trying to make sense of her life in a tumultuous era. It is also a haunting, aching description of how hard it is to believe in your own talent and the unexpected influences that bring us into ourselves along the way.
Review:
I was given this book as a gift, but I have been curious about it. There was a lot of interest when this first came out a few years ago.
Here, we follow Edie as she tries to make sense of her life. She starts up an affair with a man whose wife is okay with an open marriage...but with strict rules. Edie soon finds herself unemployed and falling face-first into her lover's family life and home.
I feel like people love or are meh about this book. I don't know where I fully sit on this book.
There were some things I liked and some things I didn't.
My biggest issue was the writing style. It felt so...choppy. It didn't flow right and kept taking me out of the story. It felt so jarring! I did like the observations and the inner monologue parts, but the story itself felt so choppy and disjointed.
I also can't buy this as a romance. It felt so awkward, and I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop at any minute. This really should just be a...not chick lit but something else. I'm blanking on a good genre to shove this in.
Honestly, I liked reading about Edie and Rebecca the most. I enjoyed seeing that relationship form and morph. I also adored little Akila!
And the ending....left me feeling nothing. It just ended.
But yes...some good, but a lot of bad. I'll give this 3 stars. Maybe the audio would've been a hair better!
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