Book review of Come and Get It by Kiley Reid

Kiley Reid’s sophomore effort Come and Get It is a compelling, dialogue-driven novel about consumption, need and class set at a state college in 2017. Readers who loved Reid’s debut, Such a Fun Age, will discover themselves in welcome territory.

Millie, a lady whose faculty years have been interrupted by serving to an sick dad or mum, has returned to the University of Arkansas as a 24-year-old senior, working as a resident assistant in her dorm. Mature and accountable, she fantasizes about Josh, her hunky supervisor, and is diligently saving to buy a home. Agatha is a visiting school member in her late 30s, lately separated from a youthful skilled dancer who married her for medical health insurance. At the start of the semester, Agatha asks Millie to prepare a small group of college students for Agatha to interview as half of her analysis for a possible guide on marriage ceremony traditions. What begins as an harmless gathering of info turns into a extra difficult entanglement when Agatha begins paying Millie for entry to the dorm to spy on the scholars’ private conversations, which she then writes up as a collection of demi-comic items for Teen Vogue. Meanwhile, a prank dreamed up by Tyler, the imply woman of the dorm, sparks a vengeful retaliation which threatens each Agatha and Millie’s livelihoods.

This reader’s recommendation is to comply with the cash, as a lot of Come and Get It is embedded within the particulars of ostensibly insignificant transactions. Reid prefers to serve her themes amid a frothy concoction of witty dialogue, campus capers and unrequited crushes, however beneath all of it, her eye is firmly mounted on obsessive consumerism and intersecting points of race and class. Though no crimes are dedicated, there are sufficient errors of judgment, blurred moral traces and microaggressions to completely alter the life trajectories of her characters. Yet Reid writes with monumental compassion, displaying us flawed people caught in techniques outdoors of their management who’re, largely, doing the most effective they’ll.