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Summary
Summary
A Best Book of the Year:
The Washington Post * Chicago Tribune * NPR * Vogue * Elle * Real Simple * InStyle * Good Housekeeping * Parade * Slate * Vox * Kirkus Reviews * Library Journal * BookPage
Longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize
An Instant New York Times Bestseller
A Reese's Book Club Pick
"The most provocative page-turner of the year." --Entertainment Weekly
"I urge you to read Such a Fun Age ." -- NPR
A striking and surprising debut novel from an exhilarating new voice, Such a Fun Age is a page-turning and big-hearted story about race and privilege, set around a young black babysitter, her well-intentioned employer, and a surprising connection that threatens to undo them both.
Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living, with her confidence-driven brand, showing other women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains' toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket. The store's security guard, seeing a young black woman out late with a white child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar. A small crowd gathers, a bystander films everything, and Emira is furious and humiliated. Alix resolves to make things right.
But Emira herself is aimless, broke, and wary of Alix's desire to help. At twenty-five, she is about to lose her health insurance and has no idea what to do with her life. When the video of Emira unearths someone from Alix's past, both women find themselves on a crash course that will upend everything they think they know about themselves, and each other.
With empathy and piercing social commentary, Such a Fun Age explores the stickiness of transactional relationships, what it means to make someone "family," and the complicated reality of being a grown up. It is a searing debut for our times.
Author Notes
KILEY REID is currently pursuing a Masters in Fine Arts at the Iowa Writers' Workshop where she was awarded the Truman Capote Fellowship. Her short stories have been featured and are forthcoming in Ploughshares , December , New South , Lumina ,and others.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In her debut, Reid crafts a nuanced portrait of a young black woman struggling to define herself apart from the white people in her life who are all too ready to speak and act on her behalf. Emira Tucker knows that the one thing she's unequivocally good at is taking care of children, specifically the two young daughters, Briar and Catherine, of her part-time employer, Alix Chamberlain. However, about to turn 26 and lose her parents' health insurance, and while watching her friends snatch up serious boyfriends and enviable promotions, Temple grad Emira starts to feel ashamed about "still" babysitting. This humiliation is stoked after she's harassed by security personnel at an upscale Philadelphia grocery store where she'd taken three-year-old Briar. Emira later develops a romantic relationship with Kelley, the young white man who captured cellphone video of the altercation, only to discover that Kelley and Alix have a shared and uncomfortable past, one that traps Emira in the middle despite assertions that everyone has her best interests at heart. Reid excels at depicting subtle variations and manifestations of self-doubt, and astutely illustrates how, when coupled with unrecognized white privilege, this emotional and professional insecurity can result in unintended--as well as willfully unseen--consequences. This is an impressive, memorable first outing. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME Entertainment. (Jan.)
Booklist Review
Emira is an educated, Black, 25-year-old babysitter partying late one night when she gets a frantic call to babysit at the last minute. In high heels and a miniskirt, she brings the white toddler along to an upscale grocery store, where she is confronted by a security guard who accuses her of kidnapping the child. Kelley, a concerned white bystander, films the altercation, which leaves Emira shaken. He emails her the video clip, but Emira is not interested in sharing it with anyone. Her white employer, Alix Chamberlain, is a successful and influential mompreneur who overcompensates for the incident and handles Emira with kid gloves. Meanwhile, Emira starts dating Kelley, who, unbeknownst to her, had a traumatic romance with Alix many years ago. Tensions mount amidst unresolved pain between Kelley and Alix, and Emira's discontent with her life and how sharply it contrasts with that of her employer. In her smart and timely debut, Reid has her finger solidly on the pulse of the pressures and ironies inherent in social media, privilege, modern parenting, racial tension, and political correctness.--Andrienne Cruz Copyright 2019 Booklist
Guardian Review
US author Kiley Reid offers a refreshing take on an age-old question: can we connect across barriers of race, gender, wealth and privilege? Emira Tucker, who works in Philadelphia as a babysitter for news anchor Peter and lifestyle guru Alix, takes their toddler, Briar, to an upscale supermarket where suspicions are stirred because she is black and the child is white. The security guard accuses her of kidnapping, and is only appeased when Emira calls Peter. (Peter is "an old white guy", she declares, "so I'm sure everyone will feel better".) A lesser novel would have lingered here, in territory that's painfully familiar from countless viral incidents. But in Reid's debut the incident heralds a caustically funny skewering of the sort of well-intentioned liberal who congratulates themselves on having black guests at dinner. The story toggles between Emira, offbeat, aimless and fresh out of college, and Alix, wealthy overseer of a woman-centric brand built on her knack for getting free merchandise by writing letters. Alix and Peter's house gets egged after Peter blunders into a mortifying episode of on-air racism - while covering the story of a black boy inviting a white girl to prom, he blurts: "Let's hope that last one asked her father first." In the wake of her husband's racist faux pas, Alix resolves to befriend her black babysitter: "to wake the fuck up ¿ To get to know Emira Tucker." This desire intensifies until it begins to seem like a kind of neurosis, leaving her in thrall to feelings that aren't "completely unlike a crush". She spies on the lock screen of Emira's phone ("always filled with information that was youthful, revealing, and completely addicting"), traps her at the kitchen table for awkward chats and begs her to join the family for Thanksgiving, with disastrous results. When Emira starts dating Kelley, a white man who films the supermarket incident on his phone, we detect a similarly disconcerting earnestness. What threatens to scupper the relationship isn't the racial divide but Kelley's racial tourism. His keenness tips the scales suspiciously towards fetishisation: he's "like that one white guy at every black wedding who's, like, super-hyped to do the Cupid Shuffle". He only dates black women, and seems to have exclusively black friends. Alix opines that Kelley surrounds "himself with black people just so he can feel good about himself", failing entirely to recognise herself in the mirror of her own remark. One of the novel's deep ironies is that the white people in Emira's life are more fixated on race than she is. Like many a young person drifting between part-time jobs, she's most consumed by angst about what the hell she's doing with her life. The supermarket incident prompts not anger but wry self-reflection: "more than the racial bias, the night ¿ came back to her with a nauseating surge and a resounding declaration that hissed, You don't have a real job." The illuminating examination of Emira's inner life, the deep anxiety of a young woman whose life choices are dictated by the demands of rent and health insurance, gives the novel the flavour of a bildungsroman. However, this is juxtaposed with Alix and Kelley's objectifying emphasis on her race and failure to see her as a full person, because of their quixotic, guilt-driven overcompensation. Conversations are failures in communication. Each talks at Emira, but never really listens, manufacturing an idea of her that fits their own projections. Language styles of toddlers, yummy mummies and Emira's homegirls are captured pitch-perfectly in the novel while true understanding flickers always out of reach. Emira constantly has to explain things that with her group of black female friends can go blessedly unspoken. In one scene, her frustration with Kelley spills over: "I need you to get that like ¿ being angry and yelling in a store means something different for me than it would for you." It's not opacity of vocabulary or vernacular that renders us so impenetrable to one another, the novel suggests, but rather our unwillingness to pay attention. Yet to call this a novel about race would be to diminish its considerable powers, just as to focus on race alone is to diminish a human being. It skillfully interweaves race-related explorations with astute musings on friendship, motherhood, marriage, love and more, underlining that there's so much more to us than skin. This is the calling card of a virtuoso talent, a thrilling millennial spin on the 19th-century novel of manners that may call to mind another recent literary sensation. I had thought of ending this review by predicting that Reid may be the next Sally Rooney. But Such a Fun Age is so fresh and essential that I predict instead that next year we'll be anxiously awaiting the next Kiley Reid.
Kirkus Review
The relationship between a privileged white mom and her black babysitter is strained by race-related complications.Blogger/role model/inspirational speaker Alix Chamberlain is none too happy about moving from Manhattan to Philadelphia for her husband Peter's job as a TV newscaster. With no friends or in-laws around to help out with her almost-3-year-old, Briar, and infant, Catherine, she'll never get anywhere on the book she's writing unless she hires a sitter. She strikes gold when she finds Emira Tucker. Twenty-five-year-old Emira's family and friends expect her to get going on a career, but outside the fact that she's about to get kicked off her parents' health insurance, she's happy with her part-time gigsand Briar is her "favorite little human." Then one day a double-header of racist events topples the apple cartEmira is stopped by a security guard who thinks she's kidnapped Briar, and when Peter's program shows a segment on the unusual ways teenagers ask their dates to the prom, he blurts out "Let's hope that last one asked her father first" about a black boy hoping to go with a white girl. Alix's combination of awkwardness and obsession with regard to Emira spins out of control and then is complicated by the reappearance of someone from her past (coincidence alert), where lies yet another racist event. Reid's debut sparkles with sharp observations and perfect detailsfood, dcor, clothes, social media, etc.and she's a dialogue genius, effortlessly incorporating toddler-ese, witty boyfriend-speak, and African American Vernacular English. For about two-thirds of the book, her evenhandedness with her varied cast of characters is impressive, but there's a point at which any possible empathy for Alix disappears. Not only is she shallow, entitled, unknowingly racist, and a bad mother, but she has not progressed one millimeter since high school, and even then she was worse than we thought. Maybe this was intentional, but it does make thingsha havery black and white.Charming, challenging, and so interesting you can hardly put it down. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
DEBUT Say you're a white, professional woman in the midst of a late-evening crisis. Would you call your African American babysitter, catching her at a friend's birthday party, and ask her to come tend to your toddler? Say you're that African American babysitter. After taking your charge to the local market, wouldn't you be annoyed, then humiliated, then downright scared and angry when a security guard accuses you of kidnapping? Say you're that white woman, wanting to right this wrong, and giving the sitter a raise or an edible arrangement isn't quite the right path. Would you go crusading with self-righteous, even self-serving zeal, not really checking in with what your babysitter wants or needs? If you were that babysitter, what would be your next move? Especially if you loved that toddler and thought you were good at your job? Aren't you curious to find out how put-upon Emira deals with her clueless brand-marketer boss? VERDICT In her debut novel, Reid illuminates difficult truths about race, society, and power with a fresh, light hand. We're all familiar with the phrases white privilege and race relations, but rarely has a book vivified these terms in such a lucid, absorbing, graceful, forceful, but unforced way. [See Prepub Alert, 7/1/19.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal