I really enjoyed this author's first novel, Such a Fun Age, but this sophomore novel felt rushed. The pacing also felt extremely off.

In Come And Get It, Kiley Reid tackles life at the University of Arkansas. The main characters consist of a 24 year old senior, acting as dorm RA, three of the students living in the dorm and a new to the campus college professor. It was deeply unsatisfying. It’s one of those books that at the 25% mark, I actually checked to see what the book was supposed to be about. Because nothing had happened. Nor had it at the 50% mark, unless you count a prank the younger students play on Millie, the RA. This leads to Millie accepting an unusual proposal from the professor, who’s gathering research on student life.
We learn everyone’s backstories. The problem was I just didn’t care. The younger students are inconsiderate, stupid and mean. Millie is somewhat better, but makes some questionable ethical choices in exchange for money. And Agatha, who was definitely old enough to know better, does the same. This was one of the dullest books I’ve read in ages until around the 80% mark. And then, the big scene that sends everything into a spiral was so totally unbelievable it made me laugh. <spoiler>. No way was the wheel from a pizza slicer going to cut open Kennedy’s wrist.</spoiler>
It’s rare that I can’t find something about a book to like, but nothing really worked for me.
My thanks to Netgalley and Penguin Group for an advance copy of this book.

Unfortunately, I just couldn't get through it so my review is limited. The college students, while realistic individuals, were very distracting. I didn't learn enough about Agatha, who becomes a central figure to Millie. By the end of the first chapter, I completely forgot about Millie Cousins being the main character (and I only knew that from the summary).

This resulted in jarring second chapter, jarring, when Millie took a central role in the second chapter. She gave me everything I needed in a character--almost too much--and so openly.

Perhaps it just isn't for me.

I am one of the last people who enjoys literary fiction where nothing happens. No matter how hard I try, it’s just not my thing. And it’s true, not much happens in this book. But I found it to be filled with suspense and intrigue over the relatively normal, if messy, lives of these characters. The snappy pace and fascinating characters completely won me over.

Agatha is a writer and academic in a messy, toxic relationship. When she is invited to teach for a year at the University of Arkansas, it seems like the perfect opportunity for a clean slate. Millie is an RA completing her senior year a year later than she expected. She wants nothing more than a stable job and to purchase a house after graduation. Kennedy is one of Millie’s residents, and a transfer student whose past is making it difficult to make friends. When Agatha interviews students in Millie’s dorm for her research, she becomes fascinated with the lives of some of the rich, white college women, and their lives become intertwined in unexpected and unethical ways.

While I enjoyed Reid’s debut, Such a Fun Age, I think it was a little blunt in its messaging and very clearly projects to the reader whose side you should be on. Which is okay with me, but Come and Get It is a lot more subtle. I think it lets you get wrapped up in the story, and then leaves you on your own afterwards to decide who was in the right and who was in the wrong. It is especially fascinating that while everyone in this story makes poor decisions, and often unethical ones, everyone around them has differing views on what they did wrong as well. That and the story as a whole really illustrates the way no one has the full story to the things that happen in other peoples’ lives.

While the novel deals with lots of ethics, I think one of the really interesting questions it asks is how ethical the residential life system is. As an RA, especially as a “good” RA, Millie is asked to give up a lot of her time and emotional energy for a position she isn’t getting paid very well for. Residents feel free to ask for her assistance with any little thing, even when she is off duty. And as the one who cares, she often finds residents of other RAs coming to her for help instead. Meanwhile, the young women living in the dorm rely on Millie to supervise and help solve their problems, rather than dealing with it themselves. They feel entitled to be taken care of by Millie, but have no trouble intentionally making her look bad in front of her supervisors. When a crisis finally does occur, they all find that they need “a real adult”, that an RA isn’t prepared to deal with such situations. As someone who very recently interacted with residential life and has seen how the system takes advantage of students who care, it begs the question whether the system is not exploiting young people by underpaying them to do what should be a full-time job of someone who is more experienced.

One minor complaint I have is that, for a novel where race is such a big factor, it can be incredibly elusive with regards to explaining the race of some characters. I reached the end of the book still unsure what race Collette was. And I was a decent chunk of the way through the book before I realized that Agatha was white. I don’t think it would be difficult to be explicit about it in the text. And because so much of the book was about the racial dynamics at play in the interactions between these women, I do think it is an important detail to include.

While I usually find similar stories to be slow, I genuinely found Come and Get It to be a page turner. The prose is relatively simple and casual, making it easy to read quickly. The characters each have aspects of their own storyline that made me want to keep reading because I wanted to keep up with all of their lives. I think the pacing was phenomenal, switching between POVs at exactly the right intervals to keep you from getting bored with one character, and sprinkling in flashbacks to reveal more about their backstories.

If you love classic literary fiction about messed-up people doing messed-up things, then you will also love Come and Get It. If you like Everyone in this Room will Someday be Dead or All This Could be Different, I think you will also enjoy Come and Get It. But, given my own perspective, I think that even those who are not lit-fic lovers will be able to enjoy it. If you tried those two previous books and found they were missing something for you, I think Come and Get It might have the special ingredient you are looking for.

Kiley Reid's Come and Get It provided the readers with a look into the dorm life of a handful of individuals attending Arkansas University. Millie Cousin's is an RA at Belgrade, a "just okay" dorm on campus. Across from her room, live 4 young women who keep their door open, thus allowing Millie and anyone else who is nearby to listen to what they are saying. This becomes fodder for Millie and her 2 RA friends, as they chat about their residents, As well, one of the residents from that suite, can hear what is being said, while they are in Millie's room.

Agatha Paul, a visiting professor, comes to the university to teach some writing classes and to work on her book about weddings. She meets 3/4 of the women from this room, when she is connected to Millie who helps her set up interview some of the students. Millie is paid for putting this together, which is great, as Millie is trying to save all she can, so she can purchase a house of her own. When Agatha decides to switch gears on what she is writing, she makes an unconventional proposal to Millie, who will be paid for her services yet again. Millie wants to put as much money in her down payment fund as possible, and in agreeing may start a series of events no one anticipated.

Reid does a great job with developing her characters. She has 4 very different college students in one room, each of whom is distinct and stands out pretty clearly from the other. She has 4 RA's and 1 RD, who again, are clearly defined individuals. The only issue is that it is hard to care a lot about any of them. The story is pretty disjointed, and while it was completely readable, it sometimes felt like I was reading a novel without direction. While there was a clear conclusion to the story and many of the characters in it, there was no "a-ha" or clear twist that kept this reader invested. I didn't need to see what happened next... just read a bit each night and just as easily put the book back down.

Some of Reid's characters deal with racism, the challenges of different socioeconomic class, and some dynamics seen in the LGBTQ community, and I think she does a great job with some of these serious topics. She also tackles some of the mental health challenges faced by some college students.

This was by no means a bad book, it just wasn't a great one, which is a shame, as Reid's first novel was amazing. This book might be a slam dunk for some readers, just not this one.

I so appreciate the opportunity to read the e-galley of this book, thanks to G.P. Putnum and Sons, Kiley Reid and Netgalley.

Come and Get It revolves around Millie, a Black senior RA at the University of Arkansas who eventually becomes entangled with Agatha, a White visiting professor and writer. While it took me awhile to get through the first 60% of the book, I sped through the last 40%, which brought the book together. Unlike Such a Fun Age, Come and Get It is a slow-burn, character-driven novel. And while I appreciated how the first 60% of the book laid the foundation for the last 40%, I feel like the book may have benefited from having less characters to focus on. 3.5 stars. An overall okay read with themes of money, morality, privilege, and race that became more enjoyable in the end.

Reid narrates inexplicably awkward situations with such deftness and levity that it feels like I'm there - should I say something? That was kind of non-PC but in a way I can't describe...

Similar to Such a Fun Age, Come and Get It follows a young woman as she navigates her desires, finances, friendships, and responsibilities as a Black woman. Reid is an expert on the intricacies of microaggressions, misunderstandings, and discomfort. On several occasions, I had to mindfully remove my shoulders from my ears as I released from a pages-long cringe.

Reid's writing always leaves me a little thoughtfully nauseated, thinking "would I have reacted/spoken/acted differently? why?".

DNF at 10%. I only read this little bit and had absolutely no idea what was going on in this book. I was so confused! And based on other reviews I read, it's not worth reading any further. It's disappointing because I loved SUCH A FUN AGE, but this might be a case of the sophomore slump.

one thing about me is that i love character-driven stories. most of my reading in recent years are character driven books because i love the depth and detail and intricacies the author puts in. which is why i hate to say that this book didn't do it for me because of how plotless it was. and for a character driven book, i felt that so many of the characters were one dimensional and difficult to imagine as real people. i really wish i loved this because i was so excited for it!!

I have been sitting on this review for a while, I kept trying to think about what I wanted to communicate about this book and my experience reading it. I'll start with, I really liked it. If you've read Reid's other title, Such a Fun Age, you'll be familiar with her style. It's a book about nothing, which ends up being a book about everything. It's a character-driven novel about the pressure of being perfect when there are real, but not life-ruining, stakes. I think this is a space that authors tend to shy away from -- telling a story in nonfiction about the kind of moral challenges that will arise at different points in your life but that don't make for a sweep you off your feet drama. Set in 2017 at the University of Arkansas, we follow an RA Millie through her year at the school. We get the setup of Millie as someone that we all know, someone who isn't anything to write home about, but is successful, is smart, is going through life checking off all of the boxes that we expect them to. If Millie existed in a vacuum she would have been fine, but as always -- her relationships with the other characters are what eventually bring her down. I loved that throughout the novel you could watch as the pieces started to slowly tip away from Millie's favor, and the climax of the book was not a collapse, but rather a crumbling. I found the whole novel a wonderful exploration of the banality of the kinds of choices we make, the company we keep, and the path we forge.

Reid's skill as a writer is in depicting real life right now. Her writing isn't spectacular, but she's very good at serving up a slice of modern life and building a tension-filled plot. She's most interested in the cringey bits people don't like to look at or talk about, and because of this and her aptitude for realism, her books are uncomfortable reads. Worthwhile, but squirmy.

I genuinely was never sure where she was taking this one. I appreciate books that surprise me.

Thanks to Netgalley for the advance copy.

This was a VERY character driven read. Typically, I can be okay with that style of book but I found majority of the characters (there are like 8 main characters too) unlikable which made it harder to endure at times. I also found the dialogue hard to read at times. I understand it was meant to be realistic for the way college students spoke, but reading it on the page did not translate well for me. I was so excited to read this one since I loved the author’s previous novel but it did fall short for me unfortunately.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This is my first novel by this author, and I really enjoyed it. My favorite stories are the ones that show people in their best and worst moments. Humans are full of mistakes, and the characters in this book experienced plenty of them. The story follows multiple viewpoints but there are two characters who the story centers around the most. I didn't find it confusing to read at all. Sometimes when there are multiple narrators, I find myself dreading reading certain chapters. This wasn’t the case for me.

This feels like a book where nothing extraordinary happens. Instead of reading towards a big climax where the story peaks, I would describe it more as a breaking point. All characters sort of reach this moment at once. I think some people might find this book boring, but I tend to enjoy these books the most.

I will say that there is a moment in this book that was hard for me to read. I tend to be sensitive to any overly descriptive imagery, and there was a scene involving blood and a sensitive topic. I had to skim past it, but I still find myself thinking about it when I reflect on this book.

I was a big fan of the author’s debut novel, Such A Fun Age, and although I enjoyed Come and Get It, it didn’t quite hit me the same.

I will agree with other reviewers that there were a few too many characters - sometimes they all got tangled and I had to go back to remember who was who. But I actually did enjoy the storylines and how all of the character’s lives became intertwined in the end when they seemed so separate in the beginning. The book was a bit slow for me and took a while for me to get into it, but I did enjoy it.

This one wasn’t my favorite but was still pretty good. Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the eARC!

College in certainly a time of making mistakes and growth and making more mistakes. And this book is deeply representative of that. The writing was straightforward, descriptive, and the dialogue felt so accurate to the voices on young adults in college. I felt transported back to undergrad in many scenes, particularly anything related to the RA experience as I was one myself.

Millie and Kennedy were standout characters. I loved Millie's determination, and reading her stream of consciousness as she figures things about herself out. Kennedy was a character that I felt I had met many times before, the person you know is not quite okay and wish you had pulled into your friend group. As for Agatha, I'm not sure if she's intended to be the antagonist of the book but she certainly is in my mind!

My only difficulties with this book were that the build-up was very slow. I felt like I was reading about mundane, unconnected events for about the first 40% of the book. However the payoff with everything connecting in the end was well worth it. A tense, but great, read!

I really wanted to like this book because I loved the author's work in "Such a Fun Age". This book was nothing like that one. The book takes place at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville and centers on the dorm for transfer students ("Belgrade"), which is apparently not a desirable place to live. Millie is the RA and Peyton, Kennedy, Tyler, Casey, and Jenna are students in the dorm. Throw in visiting professor Agatha Paul, fellow RAs Collette and Ryland and Joanie, Residence Life staff Josh and Aimee and I think you've got everyone.

Which leads to my first gripe with this book. There are too many characters. I was so confused who was who. You get a lot of background on the characters, but it's all essentially meaningless because there's no plot bringing it all together. The story goes back and forth so much too that by the time you get back to someone you've forgotten who they are.

Second, these characters were all completely unbelievable to me. I had to keep reminding myself that this was supposed to be taking place at a college. The students were so immature and scattered, it seemed much more like a high school setting to me. I just couldn't connect with any of them.

Then there's the dialogue. I don't know what it was, but I felt like I actually couldn't follow some of the conversations. I didn't understand what they were saying and I couldn't tell who was talking sometimes.

The book started off promising with visiting professor Agatha Paul interviewing three of the students in RA Millie's dorm. Agatha learned a lot about the girls and became intrigued by their attitudes toward money and their seemingly privileged lives. But then the book veers off and never really gets back on track.

This was definitely a miss for me, but I will keep an eye on this author as I think she shows a lot of promise. Thanks to @netgalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Was so excited for Kiley Reid’s next novel (after loving Such a Fun Age) and she delivered! A wonderfully written book— her way with words is so magical and I find myself falling head first into every story she writes. That being said, this book is all vibes and character story (and less plot). It’s a slow meander of a book, set in a college dorm with a variety of characters of different backgrounds and personalities. I had fun but definitely felt a bit lost at times! 3.5/5 rounded up!

I am a huge fan of Kiley Reid's debut, telling everyone I know to read it, and this sophomore work did not disappoint. Fierce and poignant, examining society through an intriguing plot and characters.

LOVED! Without a doubt a five. I’m drawn to books that have what some would say “no plot” very “character driven” … some books this had me thinking about were Flores and Miss Paula, Prep, and All Adults Here. The personalities really jumped off the page and I felt like I knew each one of these characters as well as place like it was real.

I felt like a Big Brother camera was placed in and around a University Dorm and we just watch the year play out. You get to know each of the characters. Very well told from back history to what’s happening in their lives now. A great look at college dorm life and those that are experiencing it.

You get POVs from visiting professor, RA as well as students and I was excited for each one when the time came for narration change. A coming of age that feels unique and buzzy. Excited to see what Reid shares with us next!

Thank you G.P. Putnam’s Sons
Releasing 1/30

I absolutely adored this novel. I love books that are more character than plot driven. I also love really unlikable characters. It also helps that my cat is named Millie. I wanted to keep diving into this story and I could not put it down. I understand why some might find this novel boring but life is boring. This novel felt like it could actually happen and I love that. This is my second Kiley Reid novel and it definitely will not be my last.