Kiley Reid's 'Come and Get It' is like a juicy reality show already in progress
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College is supposed to be a time to find out who you really are.
Sometimes that discovery doesn't go as you hoped.
"Come and Get It," (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 384 pp., ★★★½ out of four), follows a dorm hustle concocted by a manipulative writer and a money-hungry student. Out now, the highly anticipated book is the second novel by Kiley Reid, whose debut, 2019's "Such a Fun Age," was longlisted for the Booker Prize.
It's 2017, and Millie Cousins is back at the University of Arkansas for her senior year after taking a break to deal with a family emergency and to save as much money as possible. Millie is one of the four resident assistants at Belgrade, the dormitory for transfer and scholarship students. One of her first tasks is to help visiting professor and journalist Agatha Paul conduct interviews with students to research for her next book.
But Agatha is more fascinated than she expected by the three students in Millie's dorm who signed up to be interviewed. Agatha's planned topics on weddings are dropped, and she leans more into writing about how the young women talk about their lives and especially their relationship with money.
As the semester continues, the lives of Agatha, Millie and the residents of Millie's dorm are intertwined by high jinks, misunderstandings and a prank with rippling consequences.
Many characters are bustling in the pages of the college life laid out in the novel, almost too many, but this is where Reid really shines. The dialogue and personalities she created for each dorm resident, each classmate and each parent are so complete, it's like tuning into a juicy reality show already in progress. It's hard not to be as caught up in the storylines as Agatha is as we observe how events unfold.
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Consumerism, race, desire, grief and growth are key themes in Reid's novel, but connection might be the thread through them all. The relationships each character develops – or doesn't – with the others, whether fraught or firm or fickle or fake, influence so much in their lives.
Reid's raw delivery may have you reliving your own youthful experiences as you read, remembering early triumphs of adulting, failed relationships, or cringing at mistakes that snowballed and how all of these shaped who you are today. And perhaps you'll remember the friends who were there (or not) through it all, and why that mattered most.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Come and Get It' is tense story of money, desire, college life
