Edie is just trying to survive. She’s messing up in her dead-end admin job in her all-white office, sleeping with 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 headfirst into Eric’s home and family. Raven Leilani's debut is painfully funny and razor-sharp about what it means to be young now. Pandora Sykes is Contributing Editor at ELLE magazine and author of How Do We Know We Are Doing It Right?
