Such a Fun Age
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.
Author: Kiley Reid | Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons
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Rating: 4 / 5
Such a Fun Age is perhaps the first highly anticipated book of 2020 (or is it the last highly anticipated book of 2019, since it's technically going to be published on 12/31/19?). It’s compulsively readable, with social issues that are very deserving of our attention and a plot that just won’t let you look away. I read it in just one evening + the following morning.
The story opens when Emira, a 25-year-old Black woman living in Philadelphia, is called away from her friend’s birthday party to emergency babysit (an egg was thrown through their window, and mother Alix wanted to get 3-year-old Briar out of the house before the police came to make a report). Emira takes Briar to the grocery store down the street, and a middle-aged white woman alerts a security guard. The two confront Emira, thinking she kidnapped Briar. A man records the incident on his phone.
Everything is cleared up quickly, but the incident sends the book’s plot spiraling forward from there. Along the way, we see inside Alix’s desire to win Emira over, become close with her, turn her into a sort of project. We see Emira’s desire to move her life forward and stay in Briar’s life, which she knows conflict with one another. And we see the effect a third person from Alix’s past has on their relationship, for better or worse.
This book is a well-written story of contemporary fiction, acting as both entertainment and lens of difficult truths. Kiley Reid has launched an impressive debut that many, many people are going to love very much. This one will make the rounds at book clubs and remain on bookshelf tables for many months to come.
I personally gave it 4 stars because this kind of story is not my favorite to read — the contemporary story with a bit of soap-opera-type drama. I don’t love to spiral through conflict, seeing the inevitable train wreck ahead the whole time. But I do know a lot of people love books like this, and I think this will be no different! So if that sounds like your thing, definitely pick this one up.