If you have ever been in your twenties, you probably have known someone like Edie. This person is intelligent and talented, but for some reasons (often related to past traumas) they somehow always manage to self-sabotage or run out of luck. It can be frustrating and awful when it happens in real life, but they'll always have a hell of a story, and our thankfully fictional Edie certainly delivers. 

Leilani manages to trace the intricacies of her characters and their interactions with each other-- which is great, because not much else happens in the book. (If you're not really into character driven books, you probably won't like this one.) Edie, Rebecca, Eric, and Akila all feel fully fleshed out, with their occasionally hostile, occasionally tender interactions providing the meat of the story. Even small-seeming interactions tell you something about the characters and their relationships to one another.

Although Edie is introduced to the Walkers through Eric, her interactions with his wife Rebecca and their adopted daughter Akila are my favorite parts of the book. Rebecca and Edie share a tense relationship that eventually warms to reluctant camaraderie, and Edie does her best to help try to guide Akila through the rockiness of adolescence made worse by her isolation as a Black girl in a white suburb. Any one of these characters could have been one note-- Eric as a midlife crisis schmuck, Rebecca as a jealous wife, Akila as a precocious child who merely serves to provide wisdom to the adults, Edie as a "misunderstood," traumatized artist. Yet Leilani serves to make them awkward and flawed, but overall well-intentioned.

Edie will likely be polarizing to readers, who might be frustrated watching her make questionable decisions and suffer the consequences

(ex. get fired from her office job for impulsively hooking up with a long list of coworkers)

or be turned off by her cynical and kind of out of pocket behavior. I personally loved her narration and thought that she felt raw and very real. She's certainly been through her share of traumas and is scraping by on the economic margins in a very expensive city, and this background makes her choices seem more realistic. As a narrator, she's sharply observant, raw, and often pretty funny. 

I also loved Leilani's writing style, which is poetic and really evocative of both sensory details and interior emotions. However, I can understand why a decent number of other reviewers didn't like it-- if you like a more subdued writing style it will probably strike you as overwrought. At times, the writing style did bother me, generally just during the occasional flow-of-consciousness run on sentence. For me, though, it hits more than it misses.

Besides complex characters and well-crafted writing, Leilani provides insightful commentary on race, sex, love, and artistry. Why young women "[make] gods out of feeble men." How intergenerational trauma and racialized poverty affect families and continue vicious cycles. Why people make self-destructive decisions when it comes to sex and relationships. The story addresses these issues and weaves them seamlessly into the narrative, with Edie connecting her own story to that of generations of everyday triumphs and tragedies and her relationships with Rebecca, Eric, and Akila fleshing out these themes.

Overall, very enjoyable writing, humor, and commentary, though definitely might be a bit polarizing depending on your taste in problematic narrators and purple prose.