Review: Luster

3 stars. The hype is real, and the reviews are right: this book is a stressful, uncomfortable, unique portrait of a young Black woman trying to ... well, just trying to survive in a world designed to hold her back. It chronicles her affair with an older, married white man and the strange way she stumbles deeper and deeper into his life - tripped up by society and self-sabotage equally and at different times.

I think I should start by saying that what this book says is true. The concepts it captures are true. The depictions of racism and white supremacy and patriarchy and youth and Blackness and failure are true (and Such a Fun Age level of good). The articulations about art and sex and hair and bodies and success and capitalism are true. Part of what makes it an uncomfortable read is that even in its most unrealistic moments, it's still cringey in a real way, because it feels like the meaning snaking underneath the unreality is true.

It lost me in two ways: first, the style of writing. Probably a personal preference, but the words felt forced, like the author was trying too hard to be jarring or thunderous or impressive. The pseudo-stream of consciousness sentencing got weird at times. There are passages and quotes that absolutely sing in meaning but fail in style, and even those are strung together in a way that isn't quite successful. I think she'd be an incredible poet, by the way.

Second, the absolute strange way everyone behaved in this bizarre story. I've said before that we are all just fucking clueless, I know; we are just apes with phones and we've fucked any semblance of an advanced civilization into the ground of our dying planet, but I just cannot wrap my head around these three horrible individuals orbiting each other in horrible ways. Each of them has some sort of breakdown throughout this story, and their subsequent INSANE and unrealistic decision-making is sort of ... unaddressed.

Listen, I'm recommending this. Luster is a thought-driven, thought-provoking book that will leave you in a swirly fever dream of contemplation. We need more books like this. I'll be thinking about it for a while and would love to return to passages for study and reflection. That's only what I'd return to - certain passages and quotes that punched particularly hard; as a whole and as a narrative it didn't quite work for me. But those punches for sure left bruises that are going to linger.

Luster on: Amazon | Bookshop.org | Goodreads