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I can’t remember a single moment where I felt ‘in on the joke’, and that’s not to say I felt sorry for any of the characters either. I didn’t really get the funny there either. Queenie was also endorsed as a comedy adjacent to Bridget Jones’ Diary. I did not find this novel funny at all, and yet all of the endorsements describe it as ‘comedic’ in some variation. I found it really jarring that the marketing and blurb drew expectations for something ‘funny’ in this novel. A psychological analysis of society’s foot as it presses on a Black woman’s neck. Queenie by Candice Carty Williams, if Queenie had been more honest, and less edited for a mainstream audience.

It’s a tense indie film I watched way too young, and the longer I listened to Luster, the more it felt like Fish Tank mixed with Hood Feminism. To take another detour through my thoughts on Luster, Fish Tank (2009) is a film about a fifteen year old girl who is so used to poverty and neglect, that the smallest inclination towards kindness from her mum’s new boyfriend leads to an affair and violence. ‘All of it, even the love, is a violence.’ Raven Leilani, Luster The reason I bring it up now is because Luster is just one long expression of pain. Though, to Kendall’s credit, she explains it far more succinctly and a lot less with metaphor than that. That is this injustice and disadvantage that they carry with them like air in their lungs something they’re unable to purge as it poisons them. Black Women are seen to be strong in their pain, that they are expected to feel less and respond quietly. 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.