Emily Everett is an editor and writer from western Massachusetts.
Her debut novel All That Life Can Afford is the Reese’s Book Club pick for April 2025.
She is managing editor at The Common literary magazine, and a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction.
At Lit Hub Everett tagged "five favorite novels exploring ... later-in-life coming of age," all books that "explore issues of money and class and economic stability." One title on the list:
Raven Leilani, LusterRead about another entry on the list.
One of my favorite subsets of coming-of-age drama is the plot that drops its protagonist into unfamiliar surroundings or a jarring social set.Luster does both, as we follow Edie, a 23-year-old Black woman, from a shabby New York City apartment to her white boyfriend’s pale New Jersey subdivision, where neighbors watch her suspiciously through the blinds. Add to that house the boyfriend’s white wife and Black adopted daughter, and you have enough tension to fill a novel twice the size. But Leilani keeps it slim and pared-back; where some coming-of-age novels can feel instructive to a fault—this is how you should learn to live—Leilani’s feels more like an exploration of how you might continue to live in a racist society, and keep yourself intact, and still have room to make mistakes and art and real relationships.
Luster is among C. Michelle Lindley’s five best novels about art, Alana B. Lytle's eight top novels about destructive women, and Forsyth Harmon's five top obsessive female relationships in literature.
--Marshal Zeringue