Thanks @Netgally for the opportunity to read Come and Get it. I am a big fan of Kiley Reid’s writing and this book is no exception. I have seen lots of mixed reviews for Cone and Get it and I can honestly say that they are all mostly accurate. The book doesn’t appear to have a solid plot but the writing is great, the story is engrossing, and the situations are going to be relatable to a lot of people. For these reasons, I recommend this book. I kept turning the pages and wanting to know what was going to happen next.

Millie is an RA for a dorm that primarily houses scholarship and transfer students. When visiting Professor Agatha Paul comes to do interviews with the students, Millie becomes entangled with her work. Millie is focused on graduating and earning enough money to buy a house which becomes derailed when she gets involved with Agatha. Overall, this book is centered on socio-economic status and race as it follows the different perspectives of the students, the RA, and the professor. It was uncomfortable reading at times since Agatha was clearly being unethical in her method of collecting information and using it to write articles without the participants permission. There was also a power imbalance in the developing relationship between Millie and Agatha. Millie worked really hard at her RA job, more than some of her fellow RAs, but it was overshadowed by her involvement with Agatha. The storyline between the three suitemates was interesting because it shows how each person can view the same events very differently.

Come & Get It is a book about power, money, privilege, ethics, and how race intersects with those. It's smart, but also dramatic and compulsively readable

his multi-pov novel is set in 2017 at the University of Arkansas following a lesbian professor/ journalist ostensibly researching her next book, and the RA and three students who become entangled in a very messy web of relationships. I feel like it's a good idea to go into this without knowing too much, but I absolutely loved it. What does it mean to be ethical in academia? How do power, sexuality, and race intersect in complicated ways? Will the mistakes we make define us forever? Should they? And how do power and privilege allow people to get away with unethical behavior, leaving casualties in their wake? This novel is exploring those questions, but through the stories of well-developed characters who are extremely human and the kind of mundane details that create a strong sense of reality and of place. If you loved Such a Fun Age, Come and Get It will not disappoint as a sophomore follow-up to a blockbuster novel.

Come and Get It managed to do everything that made Such a Fun Age great without being an echo of the same thoughts or sentiments. I love that Kiley Reid makes characters who feel wholly familiar. As a reader with the benefit of emotional distance from the situation and a few years on college students, seeing the absolute wreck of a situation coming got painful. Despite wanting to beg the characters to see reason, their decisions felt so real I can’t imagine they would have even listened. My only true complaint is how the southern accent was written in the book. It felt jarring and didn’t work for me. The audio helped me get right past that with some great narration when I switched partway through though.

Reid is exquisitely observant and I love the people watching in her character driven novel. As someone who came of age in the Southern evangelical church, the whole book was worth the page describing how church people talk about people they don’t like. I was dying over it and I’m sure it goes down as my longest highlight in a book. Overall I’d gladly recommend this!

Come & Get It is a story about a group of students, some RA’s and a professor at the University of Arkansas and how they all become entwined in a complicated relationship/friendship and how their pasts both create their present and will affect their futures due to incidents which occur at the University over a short period of time. The plot is imaginatively, yet, possible and probable when you stop to think about the narrative.

It begins with a visiting professor, Agatha Paul who is there to write a book about weddings. She gets permission to ask some of the female student’s questions. The questions turn into more than she expected from these southern girls. She then gets permission from the Senior RA, Millie Cousins, who is 24 and older than most students at the college to use her room which is located next to the suite in which the girls are located to listen to them. She agrees.

But Millie has her own problems with this suite of girls. They come to her with caddy questions about each other and then they decide to pull a prank on her and another RA. They decide to reciprocate back, perhaps not the best idea. And that starts a war of the roses type situation.

Meanwhile, Professor Paul is getting incredible stories from these girls and bringing them to a magazine and starts to get paid for them. The girls start to really not get along and we have some mental health issues complicating the girls’ relationships. All seems to be going well until the whole thing backfires on everyone! Millie had no idea what else Agatha had been writing about. And she is stunned.

With bits and pieces which come out about the past lives and issues of all these women, it’s no wonder things went wrong so fast!

Come & Get It is an interesting look at college life as seen through the eyes of a group of women who want so much but have everything to lose. Will the outcome change them for the better? We will see.

Thank you #NetGalley #G.P.PutnamSons #KileyReid #Come&GetIt for the advanced copy.

I just couldn’t get into this one. I wasn’t connecting to any of the characters or the story. I stepped away multiple times and tried to give it a fair shot but it ended up a dnf for me. I did enjoy the writing style and may try it again in a few months when I’m in a different headspace.

3.5 stars

I loved Reid’s debut novel, Such a Fun Age. With it, she showcased her sharp ability to create characters who are fully human—good, bad, and everything in between—and a narrative that’s as messy as life itself.

Set in an Arkansas University dorm, this novel is chockful of characters, but two take center stage: Millie, a 24-year-old Black woman who works as an RA and Agatha, a 38-year-old white woman, who’s a visiting professor and journalist researching a story about young women and weddings.

We also get to know a host of students and RAs, all living/working in a dorm for underprivileged students. Themes of money/power, both related to socio-economic status and race are explored through the everyday conversations and situations of these women. Agatha becomes so immersed in this dynamic, she gets Millie to agree to let her eavesdrop on the conversations in one of the suites for $40/week. Agatha then takes her research and turns it into profiles for Teen Vogue.

Reid’s ear for realistic dialogue is extraordinary...I listened to part of the audio for this, and narrator Nicole Lewis did an excellent job. I rightly cringed at the way Agatha was able to use her power over Millie, and how some of the students treated each other. While the characters were distinct and compelling, I still feel like this novel was missing the spark of Reid’s debut. The beginning of the book slogs a bit as we get convo after convo with no real narrative action. I have no problem with unlikeable characters, but Agatha tested my patience, even with the reveals in her backstory. While the “big” moments held narrative weight, they still didn’t combine into an even whole.

All that said, Reid’s writing is an absolutely fresh voice in contemporary fiction. Although this one didn’t fully connect with me, I’m very much looking forward to what she writes next.

Thanks to @netgalley and @putnambooks for the gifted copy in exchange for a review.

Absolutely captivating read! From the first page to the last, I was completely engrossed. Definitely a must-read for any book lover!

This was an interesting one! Different than what I usually read, but still one that I finished. I didn't love it--definitely a character driven story.

Thank you NetGalley and Kiley Reid!

If you read and loved Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson, I think you'll love Come and Get It. This book isn't a page-turning thriller, its not a romance, it really doesn't have a plot at all -- it is a social observation of women, money, culture, and youth. It follows the lives of three women at the University of Arkansas: Agatha, the visiting professor, Millie, the RA, and Kennedy, the transfer student.

We first meet Agatha as she leads a discussion on weddings with a group of girls from the University but quickly becomes fascinated by their relationship to money, from the allowances they get from their parents, to the on-campus jobs they do, and the "practice paychecks" they get from their dads business. I noted while reading that I once had a friend who also had "practice paychecks" from her dad. Too real.

Agatha begins turning this conversation into a popular feature in Teen Vogue, and enlists Millie's help in getting more content by listening to the girls conversations through Millie's room's wall in the dorm. Agatha, at times, thinks about the unethical ways she is getting the information for her pieces but never actually regrets doing it. On the other side of the wall is Kennedy's room. Kennedy is a transfer student who left her previous school after a traumatic event and comes to the University of Arkansas with a good helping of social anxiety and never truly fitting in. This is all exemplified when Kennedy is invited to a BBQ with a new friend from class, but can't get through the mixed text messages of logistics, and so, ends up at Target putting things she doesn't need in her shopping cart. Again, too real.

I loved this book. I know it won't be for anyone, but it was a five star read for me.

Kiley Reid's Come and Get It is about a group of women whose lives intersect at a dorm at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Agatha is a researcher, non-fiction writer, and visiting English professor. Millie is a college senior and residence hall advisor. They're joined by a cast of young women living in the same suite in the dorm.

Agatha's research is the vehicle Reid uses to take a critical look at the role of money, race, and privilege in the college experience. Agatha's ethics as a researcher and writer exposes additional problems, and Agatha's relationship with Millie is fraught with complexities, particularly about age and power.

For me, Come and Get It was a character exploration. I would have appreciated more development of the minor characters; they sometimes felt stereotypical and one-dimensional. There was development and change in Agatha and Millie, but the changes they experienced were not positive and came with big implications for career and personal life for both of them.

"Come and Get It" is a fun novel that offers a glimpse into the lives of characters navigating the complexities of modern existence, and college life. Reid's sharp wit and keen insight shines through, as she explores themes of desire, money, and greed with unflinching honesty. The novel captivates with its authenticity and depth, leaving a lasting impression on the reader. Reid's sophomore novel is a great read for fans of contemporary fiction.

This started out like a juicy gossipy kind of romp, but I think maybe it took itself too seriously or I just missed the plot. I didn’t love the idea of a professor (?) doing the things that she did for her book, or was it a book? I just didn’t vibe with this one.

Did not finish reading this book seeing as I was unable to find it interesting in the first several pages. Will revisit at a later point.

I think I lost the plot, but not sure if there was ever one to begin with? Despite the fact that the story revolved primarily around tension and minor conflict, I still very much enjoyed Reid's writing and unpacking the complex emotions and actions of these characters.

Kiley Reid has an incredibly unique and atmospheric writing voice, and while I really enjoyed that throughout most of this book, unfortunately, the rest really fell flat for me. I think if you like character-heavy literary fiction, there's a good chance this will work for you--and normally, it would work for me, too. Come and Get It was just too slow for me. As much as I appreciated how well-rounded and thought out each character was, and how well I could picture them and the settings they were in, I didn't actually feel any sort of pull to continue reading about them. This is definitely a character study, and it is presented as such in the synopsis, but I think it markets itself as a bit more exciting throughout than it actually is. Nothing really happens until at least 50%, and 200 pages of nothing but character work was just too much for me.

This book certainly does have important things to say about money, class, power, and how these things impact interpersonal relationships. I just wish it was able to say them a little faster, because it quickly became plodding. I really don't think 400 pages were necessary to tell this story.

Overall, though, I think this may just be a case of this being the wrong book for me and the perfect book for plenty of other people. Kiley Reid is fantastic at capturing the feeling of everyday existence, the little things we tend to notice about others, and the way that people actually talk to each other. Her dialogue was really enjoyable. I definitely recommend fans of Reid's first book check this one out, as well as anyone attracted by the premise!

I really enjoyed Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid, so I was really excited about the new novel from Kiley Reid. I typically love a book with not much going on, but unfortunately this one fell a little flat for me. It wasn't an unenjoyable read, but it did feel pretty forgettable,.

Kiley Reid has a unique way of writing about the every day with such character development that it turns into a page turner. Come and Get It includes a huge cast of characters attending and working at a college in Arkansas.

Whenever I see a Kiley Reid book pop up I get so excited because I always remember her as a great writer (she is), with fun (yes), lighthearted (no?) stories.
I might feel a little momentarily bait and switched but I'm never disappointed. The way her characters play in every shade of gray, the overlapping situations that bring the characters together and the wild end to each ride is always worth it.
Come and Get It features a college campus with a famous author as a visiting lecturer doing research for her next writing, a suite of college girls in a scholarship dorm known for being a bit off beat due to the diversity of those scholarships, and the Resident Advisors meant to keep the girls in line. Though doubts, loves, pranks, studies, drama, and subterfuge, this book has all the moral grays and it spills all the tea.

#netgalley
#comeandgetit

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

My Selling Pitch:
Do you want to read a book full of social commentary that can’t decide if it wants to be a satire of college girl stereotypes or a slice-of-life character study? Are you willing to slog through the first 50% of a book to get a mediocre payoff from the ending?

Pre-reading:
On this episode of Samantha reads a buzzy author’s sophomore novel because she never got to the first one. I really like this cover. It reminds me of Babe.

Thick of it:
parsimoniously

Lit fic loves piss sin lol

Who hates pup cups? That’s so sweet. It’s literally just joy. Also, little free libraries are adorable.

OK, the class examination of privilege is very good, but also I love my balayage hair. Why can’t we just like things? Why does something have to automatically be hated on if white women like it?

Bunco

Peaches and cokes are my favorite gummies too.

There's quite a whiff of body shaming to this book.

You know, I’m from New England, and I love ponies, and I am not a skinny bitch.

What New Englander is wearing checkered vans with tube socks and also being an equestrian. That doesn’t go together.

What New England equestrian girly is paying attention to a 5’4 blond man.

Clear is not a color.

Chem majors are something else.

I don’t like this girl, Colette, at all, and she’s not a New Englander.

That’s not a ton of stuff? That’s like a very normal amount of stuff to try and make your dorm room nice.

This is so dumb. First come, first serve, and mind your fucking business about what your roommates bring.

This audiobook is doing a lot of heavy lifting for this book’s dialogue.

Why would you not want a single? That’s insane to me.

Please tell me Kennedy didn’t get raped. I’m really not looking to read another rape book.

I mean, I wouldn’t know that that sign is for the Talking Heads either. This book is just really rubbing me the wrong way with how it’s describing women. It just seems like it’s making fun of them for liking things, and it’s really not doing it for me.

Every time she describes other women it pisses me off because it’s really coming across as us versus them and I don’t like it.

fuchsine

Why would that mean your house is haunted? Also, the stereotyping is not doing it for me. I understand white people cliches are insufferable at best, but like come on.

4 shoes. What do you mean 4 shoes?

Agatha is wrong. It’s not her place to say how another woman spends her money. It’s her money. They have different financial priorities. Robin’s not wrong for living like that.

That’s literally not what she’s saying at all. There's a time and place for disturbing facts. First thing in the morning is not it.

~Girl dinner~

I hate Agatha. Do you not have knives for daily use?

I can’t hear monotone yet peppy.

You hate the getting there stories, but she’s literally a writer so the whole point is getting there, and this author’s story feels like a getting there story. I hate it here. DNF. I want to be done. (And then her own novel is later described in a way that feels like it’s a getting there story.)

But like Robin is right. She hates when other people enjoy things. Her opinion is the only right one and is fact.

No one who is struggling for money thinks of paying for HBO.

So AKC doesn't allow red labs or white marks.

That’s not a prank.

Zarf

Ha, the irony. I’m drinking a lavender latte right now.

What’s wrong with eating the cheese? What am I missing? You provided her with a snack. She ate the snack. Why is that wrong? And I don't understand if this is supposed to be a haha white people love cheese thing because the people critiquing this behavior are also white.

So now you’ve misattributed quotes but still think you’re saying something about privilege. How-

AGATHA SUCKS

I think what’s frustrating me so much about this book is that it’s not clear about who it’s trying to villainize so I can’t tell if I should be criticizing the statements as something the author is saying and believes or if it’s a problematic opinion she’s purposely given to a character to illustrate why they’re flawed. Like are we supposed to hate the professor for doing this unethical shit or are we supposed to hate Jenna for speaking carelessly? Because it reads like we’re supposed to hate Jenna, but I’m coming out of this hating Agatha.

What’s the law in Bama about recording because I think Massachusetts has like a two-party consent law or something. (Googled and someone actively involved in the conversation has to consent to being recorded.)

Hey girlypop, I sure hope you don’t mean this, but this is reading like shy, lonely girls pretend to get raped for attention. Or fantasize about it. And if you have anything close to that perspective, go fuck yourself so hard.

Hoydenish

Why do all her fantasies with women involve violence?

Is she really making fun of uptalk diction? Is this a joke? (I’ve read a couple nonfiction books that have definitely convinced me that criticizing language styles is rooted in misogyny and racism.)

This book is just coming across as internalized misogyny, but thinking it’s woke, but it’s really just hating other women.

That’s not being a white woman? What the fuck kind of quote and viewpoint is that? (And again is this the author’s actual belief or is this a deeply flawed character saying this? I don’t know. And I hate that.)

I mean, I like the parallelism of characters and showing that they all actually think the same way even though they’re all being awful to each other.

Do not give dogs beer

Does the dog die dot com. Yeef.

That’s so far-fetched. Why wouldn’t you just have her actually hit the dog?

This is reading like the author saw the cheerleader who got pregnant and killed her baby and was like how can I spin this for my book? And it feels very icky to me. It feels like well, how would the cheerleader go on with her life after everyone knew that she did such an awful thing, but that would be too dark for this book, so like what if I did the equivalent of a baby to white people- I know a dog. And, like a dog will garner more universal sympathy than teenage pregnancy which can create controversy because people don’t want teens to have sex.

If anything, I’m more jealous of your trauma is again a wild quote and yet another time I’m unsure whether the author is fetishizing trauma or she’s exaggerating to emphasize how crazy American media is.

Am I done with this yet.

This is her version of Rooney’s Beautiful World

I feel like Kennedy is going to kill herself as a result of this bullying and I just don’t want to read that.

This ending is saving this book.

Agatha SUCKS.

This ending is SAVING this book

Another 3.5 lol.

Post-reading:
I’ve been sitting on this review for a full day, and I’m still not quite sure how I feel about this book.

I think there’s so much to unpack and analyze and discuss within the novel. I’m just not sure it’s worth your time to do all that.

On the one hand, I’m so glad that there was payoff and a reason for the first 50% of this book. But that first 50% was fucking miserable to read. It’s eye-wateringly boring. In my opinion, the book struggles from the get-go because it can’t decide if it wants to be campy satire with over-the-top depictions of privileged college students or if it wants to be slice-of-life everyday horror. And I hesitate to even suggest that this book has horror elements because it doesn’t, but it would’ve been so much more successful for me if it did. Instead, it unfolds like a theatrical classic. There’s a reverse Gatsby-ness to it. I hate Gatsby. Feel free to write off my opinion for that. I think the story flounders through its beginning trying to give you character backstories for people that never truly earn your empathy, only to tangle their plot lines together so that the story can converge on one over-the-top incident that derails the characters’ expected outcomes, only for it to all work out okay enough in the end.

And while the story struggles to pick a lane, more damningly it fails to structure itself around a clear and identifiable hero arc. All these characters SUCK. It’s intentional. What muddies things is the social commentary. Is that an opinion the author is trying to voice or is that an opinion she’s given to a character to show that they’re flawed? While the concept of that is intriguing, the moral ambiguity produced by this story stems from prank wars and fun money which isn’t enough to carry the theme. It’s boring. It’s nit-picky. Without a pointed angle to the commentary, it comes off wishy-washy. It comes off very both sides make good points and that’s shit.

And staying so removed and neutral on the commentary made it come off offensive. It felt like a lot of the book was making fun of women for liking things, like that was the only way to show class divide. It made me not want to read it or take my time trying to parse out the book’s messaging. There’s fat shaming. There’s victim blaming. And what’s so frustrating is that I don’t know whether to blame the author for that or her characters. The attempts at satire just felt mean. It relied so heavily on stereotypes like white women love cheese and Target. Millie’s RA sidekicks feel like they’re borrowed from Mean Girls.

I think, I think-the book is attempting to add to the discussion that people are more than your first impressions of them. That everyone has layers, that everyone has depth, that everyone is going through their own private hells, and that those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. But that messaging is murky at best and subtext at most, and there’s a hell of a lot of books that do it more effectively and more enjoyably. Fredrik Backman’s Anxious People is my favorite example. But you’re shooting yourself in the foot if that’s your intended message when you then rely on melodrama that doesn’t have any of the ~drama~ to convey that message to your audience.

Which then, let’s talk about this book’s audience. I’m not sure who this book is supposed to be for. I imagine it’s most relatable to, and thus effective for, my age demographic-the the 20-something lit fic girlies. But I’m a dumb, dumb bitch. I shouldn’t have to struggle this much to comprehend an author’s meaning. The message should be accessible to its audience.

There’s one line in this book that I particularly hated. The idea that Agatha went to therapy to learn how to be a white woman was offensive. The book’s preoccupation with women’s trauma being used as cries for attention is so icky. And again, it’s like am I blaming the author for sending this message to her audience or is she making characters purposely distasteful? And I think it’s a little bit of both, and that’s why I don’t like this book.

But the book’s not all bad. I enjoyed the metaness of it; Characters hate,
meandering stories, meanwhile, they’re stuck in one. The professor writes off any essay with a name for an opening line, but many of the chapters start off that way. The epigraph frames the book excellently, but its meaning is only clear once you finish the book.

I think the people who blast this book for saying that nothing happens in it are fundamentally wrong. Plenty happens, it’s just boring. It is so goddamn slow. There’s no compelling hook to push you through the first half, and the back half relies on you suspending your disbelief and buying into these characters, absurd traumas. And what frustrates me is that they don’t have to be absurd. You can easily sub in Kennedy hitting the dog with her car when she pulls out of the driveway or the two girls fighting over a knife instead of a pizza cutter. I’m not sure what’s to be gained from writing the scenes as they are because it’s not humor. It’s not proper satire because the rest of the book doesn’t work as satire. I just don’t get it. And it’s frustrating because I’d like to.

I think this book would benefit from a book club discussion. I think you would get more out of it with more eyes on it. But I read alone and for enjoyment. I’m not a critic. I’m not an English major. I have no qualifications for voicing my opinions on all these books, but goddamn, I’m gonna do it anyway. I don’t think she’s a waste of your time. I just think you can have more enjoyable reading experiences elsewhere. And if you do pick this book up, I highly recommend the audiobook because I would not have gotten through this book without it. That narrator carried the dialogue.

Who should read this:
Social commentary fans
Melodrama fans

Do I want to reread this:
Maybe? If I had more time and like a discussion group because I think there’s a lot to pick apart here. I just don’t wanna do it lol

Similar books:
* Beautiful World Where Are You by Sally Rooney-shitty people being shitty to each other, character study
* Vladimir by Julia May Jonas-affairs, character study, academia
* Sirens & Muses by Antonia Angress-shitty people being shitty to each other, character study, academia
* Big Swiss by Jen Beagin-affairs, character study, lesbians
* Anxious People by Fredrik Backman-ensemble cast, character study, people are more than your first impressions
* The Men Can’t Be Saved by Ben Purkert-purposely insufferable characters, character study, gay subtext
* Bunny by Mona Awad-psychological horror, campy satire, academia, lesbians