A Best Book of the Year: The Washington Post • Chicago Tribune • NPR • Vogue • Elle • Real Simple • InStyle • Good Housekeeping • Parade • Slate • Vox • Kirkus Reviews • Library Journal • BookPage Longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize An Instant New York Times BestsellerA Reese’s Book Club Pick “The most provocative page-turner of the year.” –Entertainment Weekly “I urge you to read Such a Fun … Prize
An Instant New York Times Bestseller
A Reese’s Book Club Pick
“The most provocative page-turner of the year.” –Entertainment Weekly
“I urge you to read Such a Fun Age.” —NPR
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.
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Shows how complete honesty in relationships is essential for people of different racial and class backgrounds to be friends.
A great book for getting a different perspective on race and relationships. It is a stark reminder to analyze our personal motives for “helping” others.
I liked the perspectives of both the nanny of color and the white mother, with the mother’s black friend and the nanny’s white boyfriend bringing a bit of their own complexity into the situation.
I was gripped by this book from the first page. Emira and Alix are wonderful characters and Briar is one of the best-written child characters I’ve read for a long time. Entertaining and thought-provoking, and so relevant to the anti-racism conversations we’re having right now.
A wise and witty book with two compelling characters and a host of conflicts not easily resolved…or illuminated.
A easy and light story of a young woman who experiences institutional racism in such mundane ways we often overlook but are no less real. Excellent audible.
What an interesting novel. Emira gets caught in a tug of war between two ostensibly well-meaning white people — but do they really love Emira the way they think they do, or are they trying to use her to signal their own virtue? This nuanced work is funny and fascinating and also a little horrifying about the psychology of race in America. Emira is feeling rather daunted when she compares herself to her own friends and family, but she has kind heart and a firm backbone and ultimately finds a very entertaining solution to her problems.
This was a great book! Excellent story and so well written, good ending too. Highly recommended.
I listened to this book on a road trip and finished it in less than 12 hours. The narrator was fantastic. I really enjoyed the characters and the plot. I would highly recommend this book!
I am not sure how I feel about this book. I enjoyed most of it, up until the end.
Emira is a 25 year old young woman in 2010. She is struggling to find her way in the world. Currently, she has 2 part time jobs. One job is a typist at The Green Party, and the other is a sitter for a precocious 3 year old. Emira is a lot of things, during her sitter job, she is a loving presence to Briar, but with a cool interaction with Briar’s mother, Alix. Alix clearly favors her new baby, Catherine, to Briar. Briar senses this distance. Alix is married to Peter, an anchor at a news station in Philadelphia.
With her friends, Emira is a party girl, wearing slutty clothes and drinking far too much.
She hardly makes ends meets, and has no health insurance, which is a concern, as her birthday is coming soon and she will be off of her family’s policy.
Emira is black. The family she sits for is white. One night after partying with her friends, she is asked to take Briar out to a local grocery store as the Chamberlain family has to deal with an act of violence at their house. While at the store, Emira is confronted by a security guard, questioning why a black woman is out late, dressed as she is, with a young white girl. A young white man, Kelley, films the interaction.
From there, everything changes in Emira’s life.
This is a story of a girl struggling to find her way, to balance racial relationships, and to stand up for herself.
I liked how Emira grows to be strong, but I didn’t like how some of the characters behaved.
#SuchAFunAge #KileyReid #NetGalley
Pardon me for a moment. I need to tell Kiley Reid that I am her new number one fan. I love–LOVE, I tell you–how she weaves this story together. I love how much I don’t love Alix. I love how much I don’t like her husband, although I do love her daughters. I love how much I love Emira and how hard I rooted for her to “win,” even as I wasn’t sure “winning” was the point. I just wanted her to have some sort of victory, emotional or otherwise. She’s 25 and still relying on her parents for insurance, due more to her inability to figure out what she wants to do than anything else. (When she does discover her passion, I cheered and cheered LOUDLY.)
I also love how Kiley Reid used race. There is the obvious discrimination based solely on Emira’s skin color, but there is other, more insidious prejudice. As Reid shows so effectively, the more harmful intolerance and bigotry may be against what you can’t see on the outside.
So which age is the fun one? You have Alix’s daughter Briar, a precocious two-year-old whose hoarse voice can be heard with incessant urgency. So much of the world to discover. So much independence to reach. You have Alix in her thirties, moving from new motherhood to her own sort of independence, both emotional and professional. And there is Emira, rapidly approaching 26 and dearly wanting financial independence. Toddler? Thirties? Twenties? Or is the fun age today?
Kiley Reid writes in a way that completely captivates you. I loved every page, particularly when Briar is present. Reid captures the toddler’s mind perfectly, but even more impressively, she captures what it’s like to be someone who adores that age and someone who … doesn’t.
The secondhand embarrassment I felt for everyone in this book had me sweating profusely. This book was nothing like I thought it was going to be. I felt for each and every one of the characters in this story. Everyone just wants a place to belong and we see that from so many different sides in this book. We all want people to see us as better than we are, we put on fronts for others. Everyone has something inside them that they don’t want others to see, but when this story started unraveling, it got pretty messy. I loved each of these women for different reasons and this book will stick with me a while.
Very well-written and made me think.
I really wanted to love this one…but I just liked it.
A friend passed this along to me to read. Although I enjoyed it, I didn’t love it. There was some critical element missing – I think it was the “feels” — there simply weren’t any, or not many. I wanted to feel angry with the supermarket scene, but it missed the mark. I wanted to love or hate one of the characters, but didn’t. So it was a pleasant read, but not one I can rave about. I wished it had been.
A very thought provoking, discussion-worthy novel, wrapped in a shiny page turning story.
I’m always eager to read debut fiction that is getting lots of hype. I heard a podcast interview with the author which left me even more intrigued. On the plus side, Such a Fun Age left me wanting to discuss it with somebody. It is provocative in that it raises a lot of issues around race and class. On the negative side, I thought several of the characters were stereotypes which left a sour taste in my mouth. In a book positioned to examine race (the first scene portrays an emotionally-charged public display of blatant racism), I think it is a shame to come up short on this front. In addition, I found several of the plot premises unrealistic.
My favorite character was two year-old Briar who was artfully rendered and full of personality. The protagonist, Emira, was well developed and her relationship with Briar was endearing to read. Full of slang and brand-names, it is a novel that tries to balance being hip with being serious. Again, I would recommend it to a friend only if she’d agree to sit down with me afterward and indulge in a long conversation.
Excellent, witty and incisive – a fascinating take on the narratives that we construct for ourselves and the self-deception this requires.
This book was an interesting story about race and privilege. I liked that the story kept you engaged from the start. It is definitely a book that gives you food for thought- how would you react in the situations the characters find themselves in. A compelling debut novel.
The characters were well developed and believable. At times the story made me angry, and that was the point.
To try to find the right words to describe this novel is difficult. It’s incisive intelligent entertaining and it brings to light a lot of things that in my position of white privilege I’m often unconscious of. But beyond that it is a fabulous read. I say all this, and it still doesn’t completely explain why this book is so good. I can only advise you to pick it up and find out for yourself.