When Kendall discusses femininity, feminism and womanhood within her book, she makes one thing painfully clear. No book lives in a vacuum, so, before I review Luster – I’d like to take a moment to discuss some points raised by Mikki Kendall in Hood Feminism. Racism, Police Brutality, Sexual Aggression, Alcoholism/Substance Abuse, Violence, Mental Health, Suicide, Bereavement, Miscarriage. Razor sharp, provocatively page-turning and surprisingly tender, Luster by Raven Leilani is a painfully funny debut about what it means to be young now. 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 head-first into Eric’s home and family. 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 show her how to do her hair. 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. She’s messing up in her dead-end admin job in her all-white office, is sleeping with all the wrong men, and has failed at the only thing that meant anything to her, painting.
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