Romance is the best-selling category of books. I don’t read much in the genre, but I suspect that its appeal is in the false ideas it promotes. People don’t want to face the truth about male-female relations. It’s just too depressing.
A writer like Raven Leilani forces the reader to look at certain uncomfortable truths. Her protagonist, Edie, is in some ways interchangeable with a lot of young urban professionals: she is working a glorified subsistence job at a book publisher in NYC, splitting the rent on an undesirable apartment, and making time to stretch canvases and make art.
She is also dating a white married man she met online. On their first date, he takes her to Great America. He doesn’t know that the meals he buys for her are feeding her, or that she has slept with fifteen co-workers in three years. She doesn’t know that he has a teenage foster child. They seem like the kind of modern couple who will fade away organically, becoming casual strangers.
As it happens, though, Edie’s workplace antics get her fired. Eric and his wife, Rebecca, invite her to stay with them, in part because they are looking for a mentor for Akila, their Black foster daughter.
The book is full of those “why didn’t I think of that?” insights that mark quality writing. I squirmed a bit at the unpleasant revelations it makes about Edie’s reality and what it says about unconscious and structural racism. Of her artistic pursuit, Edie says, “I’ve made my own hunger into a practice…so that when I am gone there will be a record, proof that I was here.”
Books Smitten 