Such a Fun Age - Hardcover

Reid, Kiley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 052554190X ISBN 13: 9780525541905

Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2019

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 showing other women how to do the same. A mother to two small girls, she started out as a blogger and has quickly built herself into a confidence-driven brand. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains' toddler one night. Seeing a young black woman out late with a white child, a security guard at their local high-end supermarket 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 it 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," the complicated reality of being a grown up, and the consequences of doing the right thing for the wrong reason.

About the Author:

Kiley Reid earned her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was awarded the Truman Capote Fellowship and taught undergraduate creative writing workshops with a focus on race and class. Her short stories have been featured in Ploughshares, December, New South, and Lumina. Reid lives in Philadelphia.

Review:

"Such a Fun Age is a startling, razor-sharp debut. Kiley Reid has written a book with no easy answers, instead, filling her story with delicious gray areas and flawed points of view. It's both wildly fun and breathtakingly wise, deftly and confidently confronting issues of race, class, and privilege. I have to admit, I'm in awe."—Taylor Jenkins Reid, author of Daisy Jones & the Six

"Kiley Reid's propulsive, page-turning book is full of complex characters and even more complex truths. This is a bullseye of a debut."—Emma Straub, author of Modern Lovers

“In Such a Fun Age, Emira Tucker’s relationships with her employer and new boyfriend culminate in an unexpected, combustible triangle so ingeniously plotted and observed that my heart pounded as though I was reading a thriller. This is not a world of easy answers but one in which intentions don’t match actions and expectations don’t match consequences, where it is possible to mean something partly good and do something mostly bad. The result is both unsparing and compassionate, impossible to read without wincing in recognition—and questioning yourself. Such a Fun Age is nothing short of brilliant, and Kiley Reid is the writer we need now.”—Chloe Benjamin, author of The Immortalists
 
“This is a deft coming-of-age story for the current American moment, one written so confidently it’s hard to believe it’s a first novel. Kiley Reid explores serious issues—race, class, sex, power, ambition, and what it’s like to live in our hyperconnected world—with a light touch and sly humor.”—Rumaan Alam, author of That Kind of Mother

“Such a Fun Age is such a fabulous book–a crisp, wry, and insightful novel about class, race, and relationships. Kiley Reid is a gifted young writer with a generosity that makes her keen social eye that much funnier and sharper.”—Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins 

“Kiley Reid’s witty debut asks complicated questions around race, domestic work, and the transactional nature of each.”—Nafissa Thompson-Spires, author of Heads of the Colored People

“Gripping, substantive, complicated, compelling, and just plain true....These characters laid claim to me, and their stories became important to me in the way art does that to its readers, viewers, listeners....Such a fantastic, serious, and, I should say, fun read.”—Paul Harding, author of Tinkers

“Such a Fun Age is such a fresh voice. It’s a unique, honest portrayal of what it’s like to be a black woman in America today. Kiley Reid has delivered a poignant novel that could not be more necessary.”—Lena Waithe

"Kiley Reid has written a timely novel that asks what we owe to those we care for in this complicated world. With intimate, touching observations, Reid details the lives of two complicated, loving women who are trying to figure out how to live their best lives in a world that does not always make space for them to do so."—Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of We Love You, Charlie Freeman