book review: Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
details
Format: Ebook — Length: 320 pages
Highly readable and (sometimes painfully) relevant, Such a Fun Age examines race and racism in an innovative way through the lens of three beautifully crafted characters – a young black babysitter, her white employer, and her white boyfriend.
summary
Directionless and about to lose her health benefits, twenty-five year old Emira babysits Briar three days a week. Briar is the charming daughter of the well-off, white Chamberlain family. While at the grocery store one night, the security guard accuses Emira of kidnapping Briar. Their relationship is explained and the night ends without further incident, but the episode reverberates through the following weeks, bringing together Emira, Briar’s mother Alix, and Emira’s new boyfriend Kelley. The three grapple with issues of race, respect, and friendship as their worlds collide.
thoughts
The story alternates between Emira’s and Alix’s points of view as Reid builds out two of the most human characters I’ve ever read. Even when I was cringing over Alix’s thought process, I understood her. These were characters that I could recognize from real life, but they never became stereotypes.
The writing and pacing carried me along effortlessly, even through extensive backstory. Without ever feeling like a heavy book, Reid navigates the heavy subject of racism. It’s a subject almost always on Alix’s mind, and one Emira and her friends confront frequently. The difference in this novel is that the racism is never violent or overt. Most of it comes from Alix and Kelley, two people who from the outside (and in their own point of view) are Not Racist. Yet they behave in ways that remove Emira’s agency, personality, and desires.
In the beginning, Emira accepts Alix’s and Kelley’s interference as she struggles to find direction, at one point actually wishing Alix would offer some guidance. As the story progresses, Reid subtly breaks this down, leaving behind Emira’s passivity and slowly defining her in terms of herself, rather than in terms of her relationships. This is frustrating at first as Emira begins as a passive character in her own story and it sometimes feels like Alix’s and Kelley’s story, but I appreciated it in terms of the overall plot and certainly in terms of the climax.
I highly recommend this book. Reid’s novel is engaging and insightful, not to mention one of the most relevant books I’ve read lately. It brings something new to the conversation around race in literature, asking us what it means to be woke and to be an ally and, more importantly, where the desire to do some comes from in an age of performative culture.
