Such a Fun Age
Kiley Reid, 2019
Penguin Publishing
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525541905
Summary
A striking and surprising debut novel from an exhilarating new voice, Such a Fun Age is a page-turning and big-hearted story about race and privilege, set around a young black babysitter, her well-intentioned employer, and a surprising connection that threatens to undo them both.
Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living, with her confidence-driven brand, showing other women how to do the same.
So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains' toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket.
The store's security guard, seeing a young black woman out late with a white child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar. A small crowd gathers, a bystander films everything, and Emira is furious and humiliated. Alix resolves to make things right.
But Emira herself is aimless, broke, and wary of Alix's desire to help. At twenty-five, she is about to lose her health insurance and has no idea what to do with her life.
When the video of Emira unearths someone from Alix's past, both women find themselves on a crash course that will upend everything they think they know about themselves, and each other.
With empathy and piercing social commentary, Such a Fun Age explores the stickiness of transactional relationships, what it means to make someone "family," and the complicated reality of being a grown up. It is a searing debut for our times. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1987
• Where—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Raised—Tucson, Arizona
• Education—Marymount Manhattan College; University of Arkansas, M.F.A., Iowa Writers' Workshop
• Currently—lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Kiley Reid was born in Los Angeles, California, and raised in Tucson, Arizona. She studied acting at Marymount Manhattan College and creative writing at the University of Arkansas. She recieved her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Reid's debut novel, Such a Fun Age (December 31, 2019) explores the relationship between a young black babysitter and her well-intentioned white employer. Within two weeks of its release, the novel ranked #3 on the New York Times hardcover fiction list.
Reid, who spent six years caring for the children of wealthy Manhattanites, began the novel while applying to graduate school. She completed the book while earning her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop; both book and screen rights were acquired before she graduated.
During her time at the Iowa Workshop, she was awarded a Truman Capote Fellowship. She also taught undergraduate creative writing workshops with a focus on race and class.
Reid's short stories have been featured in Ploughshares, December, New South, and Lumina. Currently, she lives in Philadelphia. Pennsylvania. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/25/2020.)
Book Reviews
Reid constructs a plot so beautifully intricate and real and fascinating that readers will forget that it’s also full of tough questions about race, class and identity…. With this entertaining novel, Reid subverts our notions of what it means to write about race and class in America, not to mention what it means to write about love. In short, it’s a great way to kick off 2020.
Washington Post
An exploration of race and racism and misguided perceptions of the issue, executed with wit and a sharp edge…[Such a Fun Age] reveals how trapped black people who work in service jobs for white people feel, how easily privileged whites—who would protest any claims of prejudice—can fetishize blacks, or fail to see them as fully three-dimensional humans. And yes, dear reader, you are implicated in this too.
Boston Globe
A complex, layered page-turner…. This is a book that will read, I suspect, quite differently to various audiences—funny to some, deeply uncomfortable and shamefully recognizable to others—but whatever the experience, I urge you to read Such a Fun Age. Let its empathetic approach to even the ickiest characters stir you, allow yourself to share Emira’s millennial anxieties about adulting, take joy in the innocence of Briar’s still-unmarred personhood, and rejoice that Kiley Reid is only just getting started.
NPR
Lively…. [A] carefully observed study of class and race, whose portrait of white urban affluence—Everlane sweaters, pseudo-feminist babble—is especially pointed. Attempting to navigate the white conscience in the age of Black Lives Matter, Reid unsparingly maps the moments when good intentions founder.
New Yorker
Reid’s acerbic send-up of identity politics thrives in the tension between the horror and semiabsurdity of race relations in the social media era. But she is too gifted a storyteller to reduce her tale to, well, black-and-white…. Clever and hilariously cringe-y, this debut is a provocative reminder of what the road to hell is paved with.
Oprah Magazine
[A] funny, fast-paced social satire about privilege in America.… Beneath her comedy of good intentions, [Reid] stages a Millennial bildungsroman that is likely to resonate with 20-something postgraduates scrambling to get launched in just about any American city.
Atlantic
Fun is the operative word in Such a Fun Age, Kiley Reid’s delectably discomfiting debut. The buzzed-about novel takes a thoroughly modern approach to the timeless upstairs-downstairs trope.… Told from alternating points of view, the novel loops through vibrant vignettes set in reggaeton nightclubs and Philadelphia farmers markets before landing firmly on one side of the maternal divide…. This page-turner goes down like comfort food, but there’s no escaping the heartburn.
Vogue
Kiley Reid has written the most provocative page-turner of the year.… [Such a Fun Age] nestl[es] a nuanced take on racial biases and class divides into a page-turning saga of betrayals, twists, and perfectly awkward relationships.… The novel feels bound for book-club glory, due to its sheer readability. The dialogue crackles with naturalistic flair. The plotting is breezy and surprising. Plus, while Reid’s feel for both the funny and the political is undeniable, she imbues her flawed heroes with real heart.
Entertainment Weekly
Such a Fun Age is blessedly free of preaching, but if Reid has an ethos, it’s attention: the attention Emira pays to who Briar really is, and the attention that Alix fails to pay to Emira, instead spending her time thinking about her…. The novel is often funny and always acute, but never savage; Reid is too fascinated by how human beings work to tear them apart. All great novelists are great listeners, and Such a Fun Age marks the debut of an extraordinarily gifted one.
Slate
Reid crafts a nuanced portrait of a young black woman struggling to define herself apart from the white people in her life who are all too ready to speak and act on her behalf.… This is an impressive, memorable first outing.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) Reid illuminates difficult truths about race, society, and power with a fresh, light hand. We're all familiar with the phrases white privilege and race relations, but rarely has a book vivified these terms in such a lucid, absorbing, graceful, forceful, but unforced way.
Library Journal
In her smart and timely debut, Reid has her finder solidly on the pulse of the pressures and ironies inherent in social media, privilege, modern parenting, racial tension, and political correctness.
Booklist
(Starred review) Reid’s debut sparkles with sharp observations and perfect details—food, decor, clothes, social media, etc.—and she's a dialogue genius.… Her evenhandedness with her varied cast of characters is impressive.… Charming, challenging, and so interesting you can hardly put it down.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Such a Fun Age is told from the perspectives of two highly different women: Emira and Alix. How did the narration impact your reading experience? Did you re-late more to one woman than the other? Did that change as you read the novel?
2. After Kelley takes the video of Emira in the grocery store, she asks him not to release it. Did you understand her request? What would you have done if you were in her position?
3. The question of parental vs. parental-figure relationships is pivotal in this story. How does Briar’s relationship with Emira differ from that with her mother? How do Emira and Alix each relate to Briar in turn?
4. While the "age" in the title recalls childhood, the novel is very much about Emira’s pivotal age and her experience as a twenty-five-year old learning how to be a grown-up. Talk about some of Emira’s challenges, as well as her freedoms. How does her experience compare or differ to your own?
5. An unexpected person links Emira and Alix. What was your reaction when you realized the connection? How did it make you view Alix differently? Emira?
6. Kelley is the first to point out the racist accusations against Emira, but at times, he seems to forget they have very different experiences, whereas Emira is always aware of it. Talk about the moments where they don’t seem to communicate well about their specific perspectives.
7. Kelley and Alix have a fraught history. Do you think Alix is right to blame Kelley for many of her issues growing up? Do you think Kelley’s perception of Alix as spoiled and privileged is fair?
8. Alix devotes herself to befriending Emira, but Emira only sees Alix as her employer. At the end of the day, did you find their relationship to be anything more than transactional? In what ways do each of the woman try to either maintain or disrupt that boundary?
9. Toward the end of the novel, Alix is confronted with the possibility that she had not acted in Emira’s best interests. Do you think Alix meant well by getting involved in Emira’s situation? Do her intentions ultimately matter?
10. The last chapter follows Emira in the years after the incident at the Chamberlains’. In what way did things change, if at all? Did anything you learned about Kelley, Alix, or Briar surprise you?
11. There are many uncomfortable, but relatable, moments in Such a Fun Age. In what ways did you see your own experiences reflected in this story? How did you feel seeing them explored through the characters?
(Questions issued by the publishers.)