I could not wait to read this!!! Kiley Reid is an auto read author for me - Such A Fun Age is one of my favorites and Come and Get It has now joined that list.

We meet our cast of characters at the University of Arkansas in 2017 - Millie, an RA who took some time off and is now back at Belgrade, the dorm for transfers and scholarship kids, Agatha, an author and journalist who is a visiting professor for the semester, and the kids who make up the rest of the residents and RA staff.

Come and Get It is a thoughtful, tension filled character study that explores coming of age, sexuality, micro and macro aggressions, and money. I loved it. I thought it was so unique and masterful in how Reid followed so many characters and allowed us to understand them all so deeply.

Thank you to NetGalley and PENGUIN GROUP Putnam, G.P. Putnam's Sons for the ARC. Come and Get It is out 1/30/24.

DNF. Gave it til 25% but the story hadn't started and the details of these people I can't care about were excruciating.

This book contains a lot of Reid’s humor and well-crafted lines that I enjoyed so much from Such a Fun Age. The characters are unique with their mannerisms, and you can tell there’s a lot bubbling under the surface. For pacing, I felt that things really picked up towards the final quarter of the book and would’ve loved to feel that same propulsion earlier. Still, a smart book with some fascinating characters!

This is one the worst books I have ever read. There was little to no plot. It made no sense. The writing was… not great. The “ohmygod” … I’m pretty sure there was over 100 of them in this book. There were too many characters, the plot was non-existent, and the end was like, what? I really liked the author’s debut and had high hopes for this one. No such luck.

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

I had started this one without even reading the summary or what it was all about as I liked the author’s previous book. It introduces us to Agatha, a visiting professor, Millie, a student and a bunch of other students. It started off to show how each of the student’s lives shaped their college experiences and in turn their life. How their socioeconomic status hones their personalities and Agatha is working on understanding it more. I constantly felt like there was another shoe ready to drop until half way in the book but the majority of the book was really slow. It will keep making the readers wonder what was going to happen. After such a laggy pace, I wished it at least had a better ending.

So...I went in to this book, completely blind. I had absolutely absolutely no idea what the book was about. I liked the set up, I was happy to read on. I was about 40% in and still wasn't quite sure what was going to happen. You know what happened? Nothing. There's an event that takes place but it happens in the last 10% of the book. I was hoping that the ending wold justify the time I spent reading, so I stayed up late to finish it. Nope. I think the book had potential, and the character development was interesting for some of the characters, but it wasn't really literary....I don't know what it was, but it was a long uneventful, non satisfying book that I kept reading only to see if something was actually going to happen.

I don't entirely know what to make of this, but here we are with the review. I liked Kiley Reid's first novel Such A Fun Age so I was excited to receive this ARC. Come and Get It doesn't really have a plot until about 75% of the way through the book. Instead, it reads more like a series of vignettes about a visiting professor, an RA, and some students in a dorm at a university in Arkansas. Reid devotes long chapters to each character's backstory, and then their lives intertwine in various ways towards the end—seeing it all come together was satisfying, but the ending was also real depressing. Reid's characters represent a range of racial and socioeconomic backgrounds, and it's clear the novel is meant to be a reflection on how that shapes the college experiences of the young women in the book. Also, the characters fall roughly into tropes: Visiting professor Agatha Paul is interesting and complicated and a somewhat shady journalist, Millie is the do-gooder RA, Tyler is the stereotypical spoiled sorority girl, etc. I was most moved by Kennedy's story; she's a transfer student with a traumatic event in her past, and Reid's portrayal of her isolation and struggle to make friends at her new school was heartbreaking. But I'm ambivalent to a tee about this book.

This book was interesting in that is weaves the stories of a few different characters all together. We learn a lot of the backstory of 2 main characters - Millie and Agatha - as their lives collide and a relationship ensues. The book touch on a number of themes, including LGBTQ, wealth discrepancies and life experiences. The only thing I wished was that some of the minor characters were fleshed out a bit more, the ending seemed a bit rushed to me and made me wonder what really happened (no spoilers). Book is a solid 3.5, rounded to a 4 .

As a big fan of Kiley Reid's first book, I was excited to read this follow up, though the premise is so different. Luckily, I really enjoyed this look at a university in Arkansas through the eyes of students, an RA, and a visiting professor. Through these characters, Reid examines class, race, queerness, power dynamics, gentrification, and more. Not only are so many ethical and societal issues addressed in a nuanced way, but it's also laugh out loud funny. While there isn't much plot and it accelerates quickly in the final section, the characters were compelling and relatable, sometimes to a fault, and I really enjoyed the ride. Highly recommend this insightful look at life in a southern college town.

This is a fantastic, compelling novel. By every metric, Come and Get It feels like an evolution from Reid's buzzy debut, Such a Fun Age: the same house-of-cards tension-building, the same flawed but painfully relatable characters. I enjoyed Such a Fun Age well enough, but Come and Get It delivers something even more complicated and wonderful: messy relationships, hilarious writing, relevant themes, and ambiguous resolutions. There's something so stylistically cool about how Reid guides readers to macro-conclusions through micro-details. She pans around a character's dorm room, inventorying his or her possessions, and by the end of the paragraph we know who they are, where they're from, what they're hiding, what they think is cool/lame... Reid effortlessly parses the subtle, often-subconscious signals that real people endlessly broadcast to each other: in how they talk, what they wear, where they shop. The hand sanitizer on a character's university lanyard, or their habit of eating oatmeal for breakfast every morning, comes to represent something fundamental about their values. The result is a fire-hose of details and cross-talk that had me hanging on to every word.

Thank you to NetGalley for an Advanced Reader Copy of this book! Below is my review, all thoughts and opinions are my own.

Summary: this story follows college students, their RAs, and a writer/professor as they navigate a semester of college at the University of Arkansas. Reid develops in-depth and extremely detailed backgrounds of all of her characters, exploring the effects of race, class, and sexuality on their successes and perceived successes. With a cast of nearly entirety female characters, Reid depicts what life is like for....

Millie: a 24 year old black RA trying to secure a job and home for her future.

Tyler: a 21 year old sorority girl dealing with petty pranks

Peyton: a 21 year old black student with dreams of becoming a chef

Kennedy: a 20 year old transfer student with a mysterious past and no friends

Agatha: a 38 year old creative nonfiction writer and professor trying to come up with her next novel

Colette and Rhyland: two other dorm RAs

Casey and Jenna: two other dorm students



Overall rating: 3 stars

This book was incredibly slow and a bit dull for the first 60% or so. After that point, things happen very quickly and are over abruptly. It just seemed like such a strange pacing issue. In retrospect, the rich character development is crucial to the overall novel, but it is presented in such a way that I imagine many readers will DNF before they get to the best part of the novel. After "Such A Fun Age," I was hoping for another success for Reid, but I don't think this is it.

I really enjoyed this book. The book was filled with twists and turns and had me feeling a little anxious. I look forward to what Kiley Reid thinks up next!

Loved it—great southern fiction with layers and complexities. I loved Agatha's character and couldn't stop thinking about her. This novel makes you think about class, race, and sexuality issues that you may not realize are bubbling below the surface on college campuses.

It's definitely more character-driven than plot-driven, which is not normally my thing, but in this case I had no complaints. It does take the book a little while to get rolling, and for the connections between our main characters to take shape, but the writing is so fluid and enjoyable that I was happy to just be along for the ride until the stakes of the novel became clear.

There are plenty of things to love about this book, but one of its biggest standouts for me was the dialogue. It is possibly the most natural dialogue I have ever read. Reid has a way of adding in the awkward pauses and vocal fumbles without it dragging on the pacing, as well as a way of relaying the valley-girl/college-girl affection without it feeling gratuitous or mean spirited. It is so clear that the majority of our POV characters are young women; this is captured realistically without being used as a means to delegitimize their pain or stories.

At its heart, Come and Get It feels like a coming of multiple ages across three POVs that grapples with race, sexuality, class, money, and loneliness. I believe it balances all of these well, without seeming to take too definitive of a stance on any one thing. It feels like a great opening to a conversation on all these points.

Kiley Reid also brings such an incredibly creative and incisive way of describing emotion. She describes a first queer crush as wanting her crush to pop her shoulder back into place and reassure her that she did great, which is such a hilarious and sharply accurate way to describe that that it almost caught me off guard.

My only wish is that the ending had a bit more heft to it. Reid does such a great job painstakingly building the stakes and interweaving the story lines that I expected a bit more of a blow out ending with heavier consequences for some of our characters. It wasn’t a bad ending in my opinion, I just think she could have pushed it a bit further. Overall, I really enjoyed it and it definitely makes me want to go back and read Such a Fun Age.

3 stars. I'm just going to say that this author's writing style and I don't mesh. Definitely a character driven story rather than plot driven, which I rather enjoy.

Come and Get It, a novel set largely at the University of Arkansas, has a lot going on! I loved Reid’s Such a Fun Age, so my expectations were really high for this. At first, the structure and the number of characters had me worried. I wasn’t sure if I was following that well, and I had a hard time feeling connected to the characters. But of course I should have trusted Reid, because by about halfway through, I was hooked, reading late into the night and starting up again in the morning. There were times where I found it difficult to believe that certain characters would actually make the choices they were making, but I was able to put that aside and enjoy (or, feel the tension of? certainly feel invested in!) the story. Now that I’ve finished it I am eager for a friend to read it so we can discuss it. And once again, I can’t wait to see what Reid writes next.

Content warnings include racism, death of an animal, suicidal ideation.

Thank you to NetGalley and Putnam Books for providing a digital review copy.

All aboard the hot mess express! Come & Get It is the campus novel/ coming-of-age/ finding yourself in your twenties book I didn’t know I needed. There’s A LOT going on in the mini universe of the dorm where one of the protagonists lives, and while it takes a bit for the three narrators stories to connect, I felt like it worked in a way many books with multiple points of view don’t.

This one is heavily character driven with not a whole lot of plot, so if that isn’t your thing, you may not like this one as much as I did.

It's simply written and not too deep, but this novel does an excellent job of ratcheting up the tensions between various mostly well-meaning characters with widely diverse backgrounds and motivations, all of them thrown together in situations that are somehow fractured and fraught just below (and sometimes just above) the surface. At one point I had to skip ahead to reassure myself that nothing too irrecoverable was going to happen to my favorite before I could calm down and make myself go on. Fun believable college setting, interesting soup of financial and racial and sexual tensions, voices you can totally hear, and I was pleasantly surprised by the queer content.

Thank you Penguin Group Putnam and NetGalley for the ARC! I've been a big fan of Kiley Reid since "Such A Fun Age" and I was really excited to read this book!

Come and Get It tells a story from multiple perspectives of female students in a dorm over the course of a year. This book was expertly written. It is tense and uncomfortable at times, and often I found myself audibly questioning some of the characters' decisions. I felt connected to all of the characters at different times, which is a credit to Reid: she makes her characters incredibly human and relatable.

I so appreciate the opportunity for this ARC. Thank you again!

First off, thank you to the publisher, author and NetGalley for a chance to read this one early! I absolutely loved “Such a Fun Age,” Kiley’s first novel, so I was really looking forward to reading this one.

And gosh, I do love Reid’s writing; she writes everyday racial microaggressions in such a skillful way that feels fresh and spot-on. Reid’s characters are constantly scheming against each other and using each other for their own means, and it is so clever and engaging to read. Reading her work often feels like being recognized in little ways.

That being said, I do agree with some of the other reviews I’ve seen on goodreads saying they felt this novel was a bit light on plot & that it felt a bit anti-climactic. From the start we aren’t really sure where we are going, but I was willing to accept that and go along for the ride because I trust Reid as a writer. We meet quite a few characters but it isn’t really clear who is going to be the main character. All of the characters are interesting, but the plot itself didn’t really seem to take off in the way I would have liked it to. I did feel for much of the book that I was waiting for the action to start although I remained entertained by these characters and their backstories and appreciated the realistic view of how lonely dorm life and college life can actually be if you aren’t one of the lucky ones who immediately finds your tribe.

I rated this one 3.5 stars, rounded to 4 for goodreads!