Thank you to NetGalley, the author, and publisher for the digital ARC of ”Come and Get It” in exchange for my honest opinion. This book has good character development, which kept me interested from beginning to end. I was about halfway through the book though and couldn’t really figure out what the plot was. I read the synopsis on Goodreads, but it didn’t really help. There seem to be multiple subplots that revolve around several different characters, but it never quite flows together - a solid 3 stars in my opinion.

I loved Kiley Reid’s debut novel SUCH A FUN AGE and was really excited for her new novel COME AND GET IT.

Come for the hilarious conversations between 3 college student re and stay for incredible story telling as only Kiley Reid can do.

The story is set on a college campus but focuses mainly on the residents of only one residence hall. I really enjoyed all the characters and am mesmerized but the way their stories were woven together. This is a story that has you laughing out loud one minute and then really makes you pause and think the next. Kiley Reid’s writing is incredible and that alone is reason enough to pick this one up

Thank you to Netgalley, G.P. Putnam & Sons and Kiley Reid for this e-ARC in exchange for a honest review.

DNF at 25%

I really loved "Such a Fun Age" and jumped at the chance to read this. While the writing is great and the characters are good, I am just too bored to finish it. I have a long list of other Netgalley reads and life is just too short to finish a boring book.

Maybe I will come back to it but honestly I will probably just forget that it exists.

Content warning:

- Death of a pet
- Mental illness
- Racism
- Self-harm
- Suicidal ideation
- Violence

In Come and Get It, Agatha, a professor and journalist, finds herself in a college dorm in Arkansas. She interviews a group of college-aged women to gather information for a book she’s writing about weddings. Coming off of a painful break-up, Agatha latches onto this group of women, finding them endlessly interesting. As she listens to their conversations and enters their lives, we learn more about each of them and their dynamics together, and Agatha entangles herself in the dorm ecosystem more than she knows.

I gave Come and Get It a four-star rating because I really enjoyed it and would recommend it to a friend, but I wouldn’t read it again.

Agatha Paul is waiting outside a dorm in Arkansas when Millie, an RA, comes to let her in. Agatha is a new professor on campus, and conducting interviews. She’s already written books about funerals and birthdays, and now she’s planning to write about weddings.

Her interview with the three young women reveals more than just how they feel about weddings. They unknowingly interest Agatha with their discussions of class and unsubtle racism. After leaving the interview, Agatha wonders if she still plans to write about weddings, or if she may use this information and inspiration to pursue something else.

Throughout the course of the story, we learn more about each of the dorm-dwellers. The first of them is Millie, an RA who took some time off school to take care of her mom. She’s hoping for a job in university housing and wants to use her savings to purchase a home. Millie splits her time between her RA duties, hanging out with the other RAs, and fixing up a house she’s house-sitting (and hoping to buy.)

Next to Millie’s room is a suite that contains three girls: Peyton, Kennedy, and Tyler. Tyler is a something of a Southern mean girl, with a necklace that reads “Dixie” for her dog who passed and a penchant for repeating other people. She has two friends, Jenna and Casey, who are in the same economic class as her.

Peyton is the only other black girl on the floor, besides Millie, and she has some specific habits. She loves cooking and keeping the kitchen very neat, and will spend a long time cooking a single dish for herself. At one point, Kennedy says she’s going to make a pizza, and Peyton’s excited about it, until she finds out it’s a frozen pizza, at which point she says she thought Kennedy was going to make “a real pizza.”

Kennedy is the final girl in the suite, and her year is off to a rough start from the beginning. The suite has one single room and one double, and Kennedy is originally in the double with Tyler, until Tyler finds Millie and requests a swap because Kennedy has so much stuff.

So Kennedy ends up in the single with all her things, and Tyler and Peyton are together in the double. Though the girls are living together, they don’t mesh well. Kennedy struggles to make friends, and Tyler always has Casey and Jenna over. Peyton makes a really good friend and Kennedy is endlessly jealous of them.

Agatha is lonely and a little lost from her recent break-up with a woman named Robin. Robin is a professional dancer, and a lot of the tension in their relationship came from money management. Even when Robin manages to make a consistent paycheck as a dancer, she doesn’t have good money management skills. When Agatha gets an offer to teach in Arkansas, it seems Robin is coming with her, until Agatha is at a dinner with Robin’s friends and finds out Robin doesn’t plan to come along.

The RAs do health and safety checks periodically to make sure rooms are clean, and Tyler says she’d want to do a prank if she knew when the check was happening. Kennedy sees this as an opportunity to connect with her roommates, and informs them that she heard the RAs saying when the checks would be. Finding it difficult to make friends, Kennedy spends most of her time in her room, listening to the RAs from a certain corner of the room.

Tyler rolls with this, and says it would be especially funny if the prank happened on Peyton’s side of the room. Peyton is hesitant, then agrees to go along with it. When Millie comes to check their room, she finds Peyton’s side completely trashed, with food, garbage, and actual dirt piled up on her bed and in the corners. When Millie leaves to go get Josh, a senior RA whom she kind of has a crush on, the girls quickly clean everything up. Millie returns with Josh, who doesn’t understand until Millie explains that they must have pulled a prank on her.

Millie is at a bar, and one of her RA friends is talking about how to get back at Tyler, when Millie runs into Agatha. The two of them chat and Millie invites Agatha to come back to the dorm to continue observing the students. For weeks following that, every Thursday, Agatha goes to the dorm on Thursdays and sits in Millie’s room, where she listens to the girls in the suite and takes notes. Agatha starts writing articles about the girls for Teen Vogue without identifying them, and by fudging some of the details.

When Agatha is out for a run, she comes across Millie fixing up the house she’d like to buy. They keep running into each other, then one Thursday, Millie makes a move and kisses Agatha, who isn’t receptive to the advance. Millie’s RA friends get back at Tyler by stealing her idea for a Halloween decoration contest.

When Peyton is having some troubles with Kennedy not washing her dishes, she asks Millie what to do, and Millie suggests

One of the main reasons Kennedy decided to come to Arkansas was because Agatha would be teaching there, and she wrote a book that Kennedy had relied on heavily. This is when we learn that Kennedy was a baton twirler at Iowa, where she had friends and a budding relationship. Then, one morning, when she was leaving her boyfriend’s house and going to get in her truck, she accidentally closed the door on a beloved campus dog, who died right there.

Kennedy panicked and drove away, rather than telling anyone about what had happened. Later, everyone finds out it was her when they see the footage from a Ring camera, and she’s basically bullied off campus. Reading Agatha’s book about death and funerals helped her to get through the time, so she’s applying for a seat in Agatha’s class in the Spring semester. After that first kiss, Agatha changes her mind, and she and Millie start hooking up. When Millie is over at Agatha’s, she sees Kennedy’s application in the rejection pile.

When Kennedy gets the rejection, she goes back to her dorm, thinking very suicidal thoughts. She and Peyton get into a fight over her dishes, and the struggle results in Kennedy having a pretty nasty cut on her wrist. Agatha and Millie are discovered, Kennedy and Peyton go to the hospital, and we end with Agatha paying Tyler to leave Millie alone and not jeopardize her job.

Come and Get It was a page-turning, character-driven story that I couldn't put down. It's refreshing to read something that flows so easily, and brings characters and settings to life. For example, the description of the dorm building in which Millie works took me right back to my freshman year. I would definitely recommend this book for anyone who likes character-driven stories.

Millie Cousins is a resident advisor who has big life goals. When Agatha Paul, a visiting professor and writer, offers her an easy (but unconventional) job opportunity, she says yes. It doesn’t take long for Millie to realize she might be in over her head as the project escalates into weird dorm pranks and borderline illegal behavior.

Reid’s debut, Such a Fun Age, was great for so many reasons, not least of all because it managed to skewer the intersection of race and class. Here, Reid attempts to do some of the same. At first, the story feels almost breezy in its tone, but as the story picks up speed, it’s clear that Reid is much more interested in the darker parts of capitalism and ethics. The book’s best moments are in Reid’s dialogue: she’s a social observer and a true mimic when it comes to capturing the cadence and beats of her characters’ voices. The rest of the book is a little uneven, and the pacing and (lack of) plot might be a hard sell for readers who are looking for something quicker or more action-packed. But the characters stay with the reader long after the book is finished, and that says something.

This novel takes place at the University of Arkansas over the course of one semester, told from the viewpoints of three characters: Millie, an RA; Kennedy, a transfer student on Millie’s floor; and Agatha, a visiting professor who is also interviewing students for a book/articles. Along the way, we learn about their lives along with subtle themes about race, class, friendships, and relationships. It’s hard to say more about what happens over the course of the book, both because of spoilers but also because it’s largely a character-driven book rather than a plot-driven book.

I know some people don’t love character-driven books, but I do, and I thought this was a good one! The characters are flawed and make bad decisions, but they really come to life so vividly - and not just the three main characters but all the characters around them. This was one of those books where I could totally picture it unfolding like a movie in my mind. And even though it was a quiet book, I totally couldn’t put it down. I loved Kiley Reid’s debut novel Such a Fun Age, and loved this one too.

This book is a love it or hate it, and unfortunately for me, I’m leaning towards the latter. While the setting was nostalgic to my days living in the college dorm, it not sure I have much else to praise. We had several different character with extensive backstories in which I never felt really contributed in any meaningful way. I know this is a character driven novel (which I usually love), but the plot felt completely lost on the venture.

With that being said, I have seen some really glowing reviews from others that I highly trust, so if this is on your radar, give it a try.

This is definitely a polarizing book. And I unfortunately wasn’t the biggest fan. It felt fun to go back to picturing that dorm life and lots of power dynamics were involved. I thought the character development was great. It’s definitely great lit fic but like Reid’s other book I found myself thinking really? Would this really happen?? But it’s definitely going to be a winner for some!

I’m not really sure how I feel about this one. I was really glad that I knew going in to expect more of a character driven story. It took until about 80% into the book for the plot to start coming together.

I can see how this could make a good book club pick - there are certainly a lot of topics that would make for good discussion especially around the big consequences from small choices we make.

Thank you to the publisher, Libro.fm and Netgalley for the free audiobook and ebook to review. The audio narration was excellent.

Very readable, very interesting, very real. Kiley Reid writes the most realistic conversations I've ever seen in a book!

Kiley Reid and her character development are unmatched in my humble opinion. Come and Get It is my second read by Kiley and I am always sucked into the story where I feel like at the end not a lot happened but at the same time, so much happened that I will be left thinking about for a long time. This read is about a group of college women and a professor whose lives intersect for almost a year at a college in Arkansas. You get the viewpoints of three of the characters and the microagressions and macroagressions they live through while also getting different perspectives of privilege and money in particular.
I really will be thinking about this one for awhile and will recommend to anyone who asks for a fresh, different read, just as I do with Such a Fun Age.
Thank you to Netgalley and Penguin Group Putnam for the opportunity to read this in exchange for my honest opinion.

Thank you to Putnam Books and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book to review. I absolutely adored Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid so I was thrilled to receive a copy of Come and Get it.

I will say this book is probably going to appeal to people who prefer character studies over books with a complex plot. However, this book provides so much to think about and reflect on. Set on the campus of the University of Arkansas, it follows several students and a member of staff through a semester at the school and these women's relationships to money and privilege. Reid does a great job of exploring the intersection of wealth with race and age and the different experiences that people have surrounding college. There is a lot to discuss here (and a short review will probably not do it justice) but I think this could be a great book club pick as there are so many aspects and nuances to talk about.

Full review here: https://www.instagram.com/p/C3DOtd9rAzf/?igsh=MWYyemR0eWxiZnY3dQ==

the work explores themes of race and class and is set in a quaint college town. there are some smart observations about money and the relationship we have with money during early adulthood. some of the dialogue was a bit choppy and sort of got away from me. while all of the characters were connected they didn't feel connected (i know this makes literally no sense but idk how to convey it any better than that). it was a character driven novel but a lot of the arcs felt disjointed to me and i wish we could have seen more dynamics between each character and how they interacted with one another.

I loved this book. It was so layered and the writing was unique, the way it captured going to college in the south. Made me reminisce on my on college campuses as a student and a professional. I will thinking about these characters for a while.

Never has a book made me feel more like a fly on the wall. In this case those walls were mostly in a single dorm building at a “Southern U.” There’s no better place to explore themes of money, race and power than the scam known as the United States university.

The dialogue is effortlessly true to life and it’s hard to believe it wasn’t lifted from actual transcripts. The audiobook read by Nicole Lewis brings subtle but impactful variations to each character’s voice. The predominately women characters are complex even in their one-dimensionalities. I look forward to digging into more of Kiley Reid’s work. I could even see myself coming back to this one for a re-read.

I received a digital advance reader copy from Net Galley and Penguin Random House in exchange for an honest review.

Come and Get It by Kiley Reid is about Millie Cousins, and RA at her college's dorm. She agrees to work with a visiting professor, Agatha Paul, who is conducting research on the cultural view of weddings. However, soon the scope of her work changes, and she spends more time with Millie, eavesdropping on the girls who live in the dorm.
I loved the opening of the book with Agatha interviewing the girls. However, the book started to fall flat about half way in. There was very little happening in this book. The big incident doesn't happen until very late in the book and doesn't have as big of an impact as I was expecting. That being said, the writing and characters were fantastic.

<i>Come and Get It</i> is a quiet, slow-build, character-focused story that explores the unclear lines of morality and ethics. The book follows a group of interconnected women at a college, most of whom are unlikable on some level, and all of whom make bad decisions after bad decisions throughout the story. And, for me, that made these people all deeply relatable and so interesting to read.

Kiley Reid's writing style is so intriguing that I kept returning to this book, even though the true action of the story kicks into gear at maybe the 75% point. But when it does, it's obvious how everything laid out before was building to that point, that we needed the setup to get there.

This book isn't for everyone. But if you're interested in a granular look at some flawed people trying to navigate difficult times in their lives, this is such a good read!

If you are reading this book because you are trying to compare yourself to the characters, you will be disappointed. This book is definitely character driven and there was just so much to unpack. It highlights differences in lifestyles, aspirations, and the different points that people reach. I think the intersection of all of this was so interesting in this book. There are a couple of trainwrecks that are going to unrail and they are pretty obvious, but it is the journey. There are mistakes that are made along the way as these characters grow and many of them come of age. I really loved this author's voice and take on the world. Thanks for the ARC, Goodreads. This was a great read.

Come And Get It lets us into the world of a college campus dorm, weaving together the complex worlds of the young women who live within it. The main character Millie is a responsible RA who finds herself veering off the path she set for herself through pranks, mishaps, and an unexpected love interest. We see how all of those events unfold as it relates to the other women in the dorm she works at. The book started off slow for me but a couple chapters in I was hooked into the rich characters that Kiley Reid so lovingly develops. They are all messy and flawed yet relatable and lovable at the same time. I’ll be reading more Kiley Reid after this!

I freaking love Kiley's style of writing. Her debut, Such A Fun Age, was fantastic, so i was very happy to get my hands on her sophomore novel. I couldn't put it down! It's satirical and thought-provoking, with themes of grief, race, privilege, and wealth. The characters made lots of bad decisions, making them both infuriating and genuine. Come and Get It is very much character driven, so if you like more of a discernable plot in your books, then this may not be for you. Thank you to publisher and netgallry for the e-arc in exchange for my honest thoughts.