I've never felt like calling an emergency meeting over a book before, but what was that?? Kiley Reid's sophomore novel, Come and Get It needs to be studied, evaluated. How did we go from Booker-nominated Such a Fun Age to 400 pages where nothing happens? Something went wrong here, I'm afraid...


To Reid's credit, her writing is fun and accessible. Her dialogue is sharp and she understands the volleys of banter. But then that's all this book shapes up to be: banter. The novels follows a group of students studying at the University of Arkansas, mostly spending their time in dorms, and I truly cannot you a more substantial summary. Come and Get It isn't anchored by a commanding plot, which is fine for a character study, but at 400 pages, you eventually begin to hope that something actually happens to these characters. The problem is, even when plot points do show up, they either surface too late in the novel or aren't woven into the story structure enough to make much of a difference. I never got the sense that Reid knew where this story was going. We just bear witness to a group of university students existing, circling conversations around one another. The novel tries to interrogate elitism and differing accesses to money among college students—who has it, who earns it, who doesn't have to worry about it—but ultimately I'm not sure what Reid is trying to say. The themes are present but never fully explored.

Come and Get It experiences an identity crisis. I wanted to love it because I'm into university fiction when done right, but I'm not convinced this novel understands itself. It doesn't build to anything, it's not anchored onto anything else. It feels totally adrift, so malleable. If only there had been stronger arcs, either in the ensemble cast of characters or the plot. Something to chart the trajectory of. Instead, there were so many characters I was never sure who to be looking at or what to be remembering. And the plot lies dormant until the final third when there's one pivotal scene that's still (checks notes) Two hours out from the end?? Again, Reid's prose is breezy and was able to carry me through, but at the same time, there weren't moments of a nuanced foundation, a strong thesis somewhere, anything to belay onto. We were vibing until we weren't, that's all I've got here.

So how exactly do we go from a Booker nomination to a follow-up that I'll very sadly not remember much of in a month? I still think Kiley is one of our most exciting novelists, but there are too many foundational issues here. At various points, this felt more like a stage play—confined sets, heavy on the dialogue—but as a text that tries to examine wealth inequities in college or female relationships on campus, there are a lot of ideas in play, but they sort of just fall over one another. At the end, you think of stepping back and seeing how the individual pieces have formed a greater whole, but then you see it all from a distance, and the individual pieces still just look like individual pieces.