Kiley Reid

Clever . . . Beginning with an interview of these young women could easily have felt like the laziest kind of exposition, but in Reid’s hands it serves as a brilliant demonstration of her own approach as a novelist: Listen. . . . The key is Reid’s exquisitely calibrated tone . . . She’s so good at capturing both the syrupy support and catty criticism these young women swap, and yet she also demonstrates a profound understanding of their fears and anxieties. Not to mention she gathers accents and verbal quirks like she’s picking delicate fruit. . . . You’re in the presence of a master plotter who’s engineering a spectacular intersection of class, racism, academic politics and journalistic ethics. Reid spots all the grains of irritation and deceit that get caught in the machinery of social life until the whole contraption suddenly lurches to a calamitous halt. Come and get it, indeed!

Masterfully captures the quiet misalignments that stem from a varying sense of what’s at stake. . . . [A] novel of manners that acutely captures the modern moment.

Juicy—naturally—but poignant, this highly anticipated return from the Such a Fun Age author is sure to get tongues wagging.

Kiley Reid is an expert at teasing apart the messy, complicated, nuanced layers of social dynamics, and has a rare gift for making the unknown feel intimately familiar and the familiar feel brand-new. In Come and Get It, she’s crafted a story that moves with the momentum and inevitability of a snowball rolling down a mountain. I couldn’t put it down, and I didn’t want to either.

A complex, layered page-turner…This is a book that will read, I suspect, quite differently to various audiences—funny to some, deeply uncomfortable and shamefully recognizable to others—but whatever the experience, I urge you to read Such a Fun Age. Let its empathetic approach to even the ickiest characters stir you, allow yourself to share Emira’s millennial anxieties about adulting, take joy in the innocence of Briar’s still-unmarred personhood, and rejoice that Kiley Reid is only just getting started.

Kiley Reid has written the most provocative page-turner of the year….[Such a Fun Age] nestl[es] a nuanced take on racial biases and class divides into a page-turning saga of betrayals, twists, and perfectly awkward relationships….The novel feels bound for book-club glory, due to its sheer readability. The dialogue crackles with naturalistic flair. The plotting is breezy and surprising. Plus, while Reid’s feel for both the funny and the political is undeniable, she imbues her flawed heroes with real heart.

Reid’s acerbic send-up of identity politics thrives in the tension between the horror and semiabsurdity of race relations in the social media era. But she is too gifted a storyteller to reduce her tale to, well, black-and-white….Clever and hilariously cringe-y, this debut is a provocative reminder of what the road to hell is paved with.

Lively…[A] carefully observed study of class and race, whose portrait of white urban affluence—Everlane sweaters, pseudo-feminist babble—is especially pointed. Attempting to navigate the white conscience in the age of Black Lives Matter, Reid unsparingly maps the moments when good intentions founder.

Such a Fun Age is blessedly free of preaching, but if Reid has an ethos, it’s attention: the attention Emira pays to who Briar really is, and the attention that Alix fails to pay to Emira, instead spending her time thinking about her….The novel is often funny and always acute, but never savage; Reid is too fascinated by how human beings work to tear them apart. All great novelists are great listeners, and Such a Fun Age marks the debut of an extraordinarily gifted one.

[A] funny, fast-paced social satire about privilege in America…Beneath her comedy of good intentions, [Reid] stages a Millennial bildungsroman that is likely to resonate with 20-something postgraduates scrambling to get launched in just about any American city.

Provocative…Surprisingly resonant insights into the casual racism in everyday life, especially in the America of the liberal elite.

Fun is the operative word in Such a Fun Age, Kiley Reid’s delectably discomfiting debut. The buzzed-about novel takes a thoroughly modern approach to the timeless upstairs-downstairs trope….Told from alternating points of view, the novel loops through vibrant vignettes set in reggaeton nightclubs and Philadelphia farmers markets before landing firmly on one side of the maternal divide….This page-turner goes down like comfort food, but there’s no escaping the heartburn.”

Buoyed by a tight narrative structure, Such a Fun Age is a compulsive read whose dark humor comes at the expense of Emira, who often finds herself sitting in the wormy discomfort of a social faux pas.

[Such a Fun Age] grapples with racism and nods to titans of literature….[A] vivid page-turner [that] explores agency and culpability through the entangled lives of Emira and her employer, Alix.

Such a Fun Age keeps it real on race, wealth, and class….Subtly illustrat[es] the systemic racism in America and the ways that we’re routinely perpetuating it or being subjected to it on a daily basis. The question that will sit with readers for days after finishing the book: What role do I play?

If you don’t read [Such a Fun Age] soon, you will have nothing to talk about at book clubs, dinner parties, playgroups, or friend drinks. Kiley Reid’s debut novel…is getting raves and making waves.