Reviews with content warning for Abortion - Luster

Reviews tagging 'Abortion'

Luster by Raven Leilani

251 reviews

tanwe's review against another edition

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emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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lilyblum's review against another edition

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3.0

This book was nothing like how I had imagined it to be. I thought it was going to be spicey, steamy and chaotic, however, it was depressing, messy and tense.
I felt so sorry for Edie and I would not have been able to handle her life circumstances. So in a sense this book was written so well that it made me feel a lot, even if negative emotions. Edie reminded me of that one woman in Cleopatra and Frankenstein and the dreamlike story telling of the one in Hot Milk. Messy, flawed and broken female characters seem to be on my radar lately. I despised Eric and felt ambiguous about Rebecca -as you are supposed to probably- but felt so much gentleness for Akila.
A short and confusing read, not sure if I’d recommend it but definitely look up trigger warnings in advance!!

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rachelcg's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.75

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georgiaautumn's review against another edition

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dark emotional funny reflective sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

This book is remarkable in a small way, seeing a blip into a life of a character that could easily be real or entirely fictional. Her intracacies within stream of consciousness is incredibly well done.

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whoisrois's review against another edition

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emotional reflective tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

It grew on me once we meet Rebecca. Overall very well written but I think the pop culture references already date it a little bit

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deeb_reads's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional funny medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

If you have ever been in your twenties, you probably have known someone like Edie. This person is intelligent and talented, but for some reasons (often related to past traumas) they somehow always manage to self-sabotage or run out of luck. It can be frustrating and awful when it happens in real life, but they'll always have a hell of a story, and our thankfully fictional Edie certainly delivers.

Leilani manages to trace the intricacies of her characters and their interactions with each other-- which is great, because not much else happens in the book. (If you're not really into character driven books, you probably won't like this one.) Edie, Rebecca, Eric, and Akila all feel fully fleshed out, with their occasionally hostile, occasionally tender interactions providing the meat of the story. Even small-seeming interactions tell you something about the characters and their relationships to one another.

"She has terrible handwriting, doesn't she?" he says... He smiles, this small cruelty hanging in the air between us. And though I can tell he feels a little bad about having said it, he seems relieved when I join in. (32)

Although Edie is introduced to the Walkers through Eric, her interactions with his wife Rebecca and their adopted daughter Akila are my favorite parts of the book. Rebecca and Edie share a tense relationship that eventually warms to reluctant camaraderie, and Edie does her best to help try to guide Akila through the rockiness of adolescence made worse by her isolation as a Black girl in a white suburb. Any one of these characters could have been one note-- Eric as a midlife crisis schmuck, Rebecca as a jealous wife, Akila as a precocious child who merely serves to provide wisdom to the adults, Edie as a "misunderstood," traumatized artist. Yet Leilani serves to make them awkward and flawed, but overall well-intentioned.

Edie will likely be polarizing to readers, who might be frustrated watching her make questionable decisions and suffer the consequences

(ex. get fired from her office job for impulsively hooking up with a long list of coworkers)

or be turned off by her cynical and kind of out of pocket behavior. I personally loved her narration and thought that she felt raw and very real. She's certainly been through her share of traumas and is scraping by on the economic margins in a very expensive city, and this background makes her choices seem more realistic. As a narrator, she's sharply observant, raw, and often pretty funny.

Like most white people who eat beans in the woods undeterred by the fresh fecal evidence of hungry bears, Eric finds his mortality and soft meaty body a petty, incidental thing. I, on the other hand, am acutely aware of all the ways I might die. (11)

I also loved Leilani's writing style, which is poetic and really evocative of both sensory details and interior emotions. However, I can understand why a decent number of other reviewers didn't like it-- if you like a more subdued writing style it will probably strike you as overwrought. At times, the writing style did bother me, generally just during the occasional flow-of-consciousness run on sentence. For me, though, it hits more than it misses.

In the city, there is a smell. Hell's Kitchen, a rotting, fungal fruit. Midtown, smelling of mildew and old pecorino. I forgot that this is what happens in New York when it rains... (200)

Besides complex characters and well-crafted writing, Leilani provides insightful commentary on race, sex, love, and artistry. Why young women "[make] gods out of feeble men." How intergenerational trauma and racialized poverty affect families and continue vicious cycles. Why people make self-destructive decisions when it comes to sex and relationships. The story addresses these issues and weaves them seamlessly into the narrative, with Edie connecting her own story to that of generations of everyday triumphs and tragedies and her relationships with Rebecca, Eric, and Akila fleshing out these themes.

Overall, very enjoyable writing, humor, and commentary, though definitely might be a bit polarizing depending on your taste in problematic narrators and purple prose.

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aaliyah3315's review against another edition

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dark emotional slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Edie works in an office, her biggest problem being that she is sleeping with the wrong people and is now known as the "office slut". At the same time 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. if that isn't complicated enough she loses her job and ends up living with Eric and his family.

I liked a lot of the book. I liked Edie as a character she was layered and interesting and I wish when the book had ended she had become less alone. I loved the relationship between Edie and Akila, they both seemed to be just what the other needed. There were real layers of what it is like to be the only POC in an area and how to navigate the world as a woman of colour.

I was not too fond of some aspects of the book, but the ending seemed kind of sad I wished there was a resolution of sorts for the characters but it just ends quite abruptly. The particular writing style of the book was very artistic and somewhat detached making it difficult to care about the main character. Also, the story's plot seemed far-fetched I didn't believe that the wife would let the girlfriend live in her house with her daughter. I didn't care for any of the other characters, I couldn't stand Eric I thought he was awful.

I would recommend this book to older readers who enjoy complex female characters.

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risqkae's review against another edition

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dark emotional funny sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. There wasn’t too much to the plot, but you wouldn’t really notice because the author’s writing in the book was beautiful and easy to get through. Being only a year older than Edie at the time of me reading this book and also being an African-American woman, it was refreshing to see someone who looks like me so nicely crafted, even with the traumatic and dark parts to her personality and life. Nuanced representation is still hard to come by. It didn’t feel like any of the heavy topics that were brought up were being forced into the book either, just made it more interesting to read. I’ve read some reviews where they said that the plot of the book in general was unrealistic, but I would have to disagree. You hear out of pocket crazy stories all the time on the news and on social media so a 20 something black woman ending up in her white lover’s house with his equally white wife and adopted black child actually doesn’t seem too far-fetched in this day and age. Each character was distinctly their own person and their interaction with each other also felt very authentic. My only critique would be I wanted to see if Edie had more pockets of true happiness and joy and I don’t think we ever got that for real, it was always for one split second. I feel like everybody has the capacity for those moments even if their life is tragic. Overall, the book felt like one big intrusive thought and I loved that about it.

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jessicaapenny21's review against another edition

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dark medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

Every time I opened this book, I wanted to give up on it. I found the narrator unbearable- her apathy was exhausting. The cover promised a funny, sexy book but I just felt depressed reading it. That said, I would still give Leilani's other work a go as I enjoyed their writing.

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its_hanya's review against another edition

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dark emotional funny reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

It took me a minute to get into the book fully, but once I got aquainted with the writing style, I enjoyed the strange yet incredible scenes the writer cooked up. Exploring dark themes such as loneliness, desire and racism in a detached and sometimes funny style, Edie our narrator paints a powerful picture.

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