Edie is just trying to survive. 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. 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.

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. 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.

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.