Such a Fun Age | Shaw Island | TinyCat |

2024-04-25 4:13 pm

Such a Fun Age

by Kiley Reid

Hardcover, 2019

Call number

FIC REI

Collection

Genres

General Fiction

Publication

G.P. Putnam's Sons (2019), Edition: Reissue, 320 pages

Description

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," the complicated reality of being a grown up, and the consequences of doing the right thing for the wrong reason.… (more)

Media reviews

...as protests against police violence and institutional racism take place all over the world, ignited by the murders of Black Americans including George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, the relevance of this book cannot be overstated. Reid has constructed a complex tale of

twenty-first-century millennial life that scrutinizes racism in America today....Reid’s straightforward prose and sharp eye for social satire allow her to demonstrate clearly how race and privilege are inseparable from the way we structure our sense of self and our relationships with others. Such a Fun Age deserves a place on every reading list this summer.

— 4 more

It’s 2015 and, in a gentrified variation on “driving while black,” 20-something Emira is accosted in the freezer aisle of an upscale Philadelphia supermarket by a security guard accusing her of kidnapping her white charge....Emira is clearly the victim of racially motivated manipulation, but

the two white people who profess to care for her shift uncomfortably between the poles of villain and hero. Both boss and boyfriend engage in distinct brands of white posturing, defining themselves in part by their relationships to this young woman — an adoring, vocationally lost black woman who must decide whether the benefits of those relationships are outweighed by the cost to her sense of self. Out of Reid’s often cloying vernacular, then, emerge some surprisingly resonant insights into the casual racism in everyday life, especially in the America of the liberal elite.

The title of Kiley Reid's debut, Such a Fun Age, works on so many levels it makes me giddy — and, what's better, the title's plurality of meaning is echoed all over the place within the novel, where both plot and dialogue are layered with history, prejudice, expectations, and assumptions.... More

broadly, the "fun age" might be our own, prior to the 2016 election — an age that was considered by some to be magically post-racist and post-sexist because it was impolite to be these things in public; an age of performative white feminism; an age of social media and virality and armchair activism and online virtue-signaling that ironically requires certain people — often, those already more vulnerable — to exist in specific politically correct ways while letting others — usually, those with power and privilege — off the hook....This is a book that will read, I suspect, quite differently to various audiences — funny to some, deeply uncomfortable and shamefully recognizable to others — but whatever the experience, I urge you to read Such a Fun Age. Let its empathic approach to even the ickiest characters stir you, allow yourself to share Emira's millennial anxieties about adulting, take joy in the innocence of Briar's still-unmarred personhood, and rejoice that Kiley Reid is only just getting started.

The relationship between a privileged White mom and her Black babysitter is strained by race-related complications.... Charming, challenging, and so interesting you can hardly put it down.

Publisher's Weekly

In her debut, Reid crafts a nuanced portrait of a young black woman struggling to define herself apart from the white people in her life who are all too ready to speak and act on her behalf....Reid excels at depicting subtle variations and manifestations of self-doubt, and astutely illustrates how,

when coupled with unrecognized white privilege, this emotional and professional insecurity can result in unintended—as well as willfully unseen—consequences. This is an impressive, memorable first outing.

User reviews

LibraryThing member RidgewayGirl

This is one of those books that capture a moment. It begins with a babysitter bringing her charge to a grocery store and having to have the father of the child come get them after a woman decided that she was not the child's mother and the authorities needed to be involved. It ends peacefully, but

both the babysitter, Emira, and the child's mother, Alix, are unsettled in different ways. There is a video of the incident, but Emira doesn't want it made public. Emira loves her job, but the pay is low and the benefits non-existent and her friends are urging her to move forward with her life. And she meets a new guy who is really, really into her. Alix, who makes her living as an influencer and as a public speaker is having her own moment. She and her husband moved from New York to Philadelphia for his career and she's lonely without her friends and hopes to find in Emira some of the connections she's missing. Her attempts to forge a friendship with Emira are tone-deaf and heavy-handed. Then she discovers who Emira's new boyfriend is, and things go rapidly very wrong.

This is a novel forged out of our current moment and all credit to Reid for being willing to march into the middle of some charged issues. Reid takes the reader directly into the middle of uncomfortable scenes and lingers there, allowing things to be as awkward as possible. This is a soap opera of a book, full of unlikely coincidences, technicolor emotions and explosive secrets. Reid's approach certainly makes for a page-turner, but some of the impact of what she is saying is lost in the sheer drama of it all. For all that this approach didn't resonate with me, I'm rooting for this one to be widely read. A novel that manages to directly address racism and it's various iterations while also being fast paced and fun to read is a needed thing right now.

LibraryThing member sparemethecensor

Pretty surprised this made the Booker long list. It's fine...but it's merely fine. This novel touches on a number of important racial topics but does so in a rather unsophisticated fashion. I think it's useful if you consider this marketed as chick lit for it to do this: it's strategic, right, to

get a certain swathe of white lady book clubs that never talk about race to actually think about race for a minute. But for the Booker, I don't know, it feels like it isn't quite enough.

The book's plot also hinges on a pretty serious coincidence that I found hard to accept in a city as large as Philadelphia...so I had some suspension of disbelief problems.

As an aside, to me the most interesting topic in this novel is barely considered, which is the benign neglect of children, what it means, who is judged for it.

LibraryThing member japaul22

This is an easy, modern novel that has some deep themes of racism and casteism. The juxtaposition of the page-turner feel of the book and the deeper dive into the racism of "nice people" actually worked pretty well for me.

Emira is a 25 year old Black woman who, like many others her age, is trying

to find her way in the world. She's done with college, but doesn't have a chosen career path and ends ups babysitting for a wealthy white family. Alix, the mother, is going through her own crisis, trying to develop her career, having two small children, and recently leaving her beloved NYC for Philadelphia. The other main character is Kelley, a white man who begins dating Emira and who we later find out dated Alix in high school.

Right at the beginning, racism is highlighted when Emira takes her 3 year old babysitting charge to a fancy grocery store late at night (this is at Alix's behest for reasons I won't get in to). She gets accused by a white woman shopper of possibly kidnapping this white 3 year old child. It's caught on video by Kelley, who she doesn't yet know.

So this event is obvious racism, but more insidious is the underlying racism of Alix as she gets to know Emira. This was a hard look at how wealthy, white, "woke", women sometimes still harbor deep-seated racist attitudes without realizing it and even while thinking they are being "un-racist".

Also present is a look at female friendships. Alix has her group of 4 "best friends" as does Emira. The contrast and similarities between how these friend groups work was also interesting to me.

Overall, I think this is a good "book club discussion" book. It would appeal to a wide variety of readers because it is a page turner, is easy to read, and can be read on the surface, but there is also plenty to think about underneath the main plot line. I found it annoyingly modern at times, and a little unfocused, but I'd definitely recommend it for anyone who wants to keep up with talked about books.

Original publication date: 2020
Author’s nationality: American
Original language: English
Length: 310 pages
Rating: 3.5 stars
Format/where I acquired the book: kindle library
Why I read this: the buzz

LibraryThing member lauralkeet

At 25, Emira Tucker hasn’t quite figured out what she wants to do with her life, and makes ends meet by babysitting for the Chamberlain family three days a week. One evening, under some unusual circumstances, Emira finds herself the subject of threatening racist accusations about her relationship

with 3-year-old Briar Chamberlain. A bystander, Kelley Copeland, captures the incident on video and sends it to Emira in case she wants to take action (she doesn’t).

A few days later Emira runs into Kelley, they have dinner, and their relationship quickly deepens. Meanwhile Alix Chamberlain, Briar’s mother, is mortified by how Emira was treated and takes it upon herself to become Emira’s friend, crossing all sorts of employer/employee boundaries. These characters provide a platform to explore issues of race and class through a story that is both complex and believable.

Debut author Kiley Reid masterfully portrays different types of “woke” white people who want so badly not to be racist, and don’t realize the myriad of tiny ways they mistreat or marginalize the black people they interact with. I found this book very thought-provoking, with much that could be unpacked in a discussion group.

LibraryThing member brangwinn

This debut novel has a lot to say about friendship, race, family and careers as well as learning to mind your own business. When Emira, a black graduate of Temple University can’t seem to find a goal for her future, she takes a job as a nanny for a wealthy couple. Carrying for the three-year old,

Briar, who’s mom, Alix, is so busy with her own career and the baby sister, Emira falls in love with the chatty young girl. When confronted by a security guard in an upscale market, Emira stands up for herself when the guard accuses her of kidnapping Briar. The video taken by a white guy who later becomes her boyfriend is supposed to be deleted but becomes crucial in the ending of the book. When Emira’s boyfriend, Kelley and her boss, Alix, discover they had a bad love relationship in high school, both Kelley and Alix try to convince Emira how despicable the other is. I found the ending of this novel very satisfying.

LibraryThing member amysan

This was a fascinating storyline - easy to read, but great depth. The character of Emira was so sympathetic and I felt bad for her with all the people she was caught between. Sometimes uncomfortable, but very eye-opening.

LibraryThing member shelleyraec

Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid has been on my schedule for months, and I thought that, as such, it deserved to be my first read of 2020. Unfortunately it wasn’t quite what I was hoping for, but it had its moments.

Having graduated college with no clear idea of what she wants to do with her life,

twenty-five year old Emira Tucker has since taken on a series of part time jobs, her favourite of which is babysitting Briar Chamberlain. Briar is a precocious three year old, and a little too tiring for her career focused mother, Alix, to handle while trying to build her ‘brand’ and also care for a newborn. Alix, and her husband, TV anchorman Peter, are vaguely grateful for the care Emira provides, and both are horrified when late one night they call on Emira for help and the young woman is detained by an over-reaching security guard at a local store who believes she may have kidnapped Briar, not only because Emira is dressed for the party she was attending when the Chamberlain’s called, but because Emira is black, and Briar is white.

While underscoring the major themes of race, class, and privilege, this incident is not actually the focus of the novel, but it is a catalyst for change in the relationship between Alix and Emira. Feeling vaguely guilty about the incident, and worried that Emira will leave their employ, Alix becomes fixated on befriending her. Emira would prefer to forget the whole thing, she has other things on her mind, like her lack of career, and a new beau, Kelley Copeland, whom she met the night of the confrontation in the store.

While low key conflict related to race and class simmers in the background, Reid doesn’t pit the white and black/ rich and poor characters against each other, instead she thoughtfully explores the varying experiences, understandings, and motives that affect their viewpoints about themselves and each other. As the story unfolds from the perspectives of the two women, Reid also examines additional themes such as identity, motherhood, friendship, and career.

Not being American I can’t pretend to understand the cultural dynamics which underpin Such A Fun Age, but I did find it well written, nuanced and thought provoking.

LibraryThing member shazjhb

Such an amazing book exploring current racial issues, domestic help, parenting,social media new money, working and of course relationships. Loved the little girl and the main character but the supporting cast was also fantastic.

LibraryThing member ozzer

In his Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, Clement Price writes “It was a time of black individualism, a time marked by a vast array of characters whose uniqueness challenged the traditional inability of white Americans to differentiate between blacks.” Certainly the “fun” in Such a Fun

Age is Reid’s dexterity at playing with this idea. Emira, a 20’s black woman, is her own person. She is just trying to find her feet following graduation from college. She is working temporary jobs as a typist and babysitter for a precocious toddler. Her career focuses are just keeping up with the successes of her family and fast-moving friends while seeking a more permanent job with health benefits. Emira has little interest in what white people think of her. Conversely, the white characters, Alix and Kelley, seem fixated on Emira’s race. Each has their own way of objectifying her and neither sees her realistically.

The story turns on an incident of racial profiling that seems all to prevalent in contemporary America. Emira is accosted by a rent-a-cop in an upscale grocery store while babysitting for Alix’s daughter, Briar. After all, a young black woman with a white child in a trendy store can’t be up to anything good—right? Like all such incidents, the altercation is recorded by a passerby on his phone. In this instance the phone belongs to Kelley Copeland, a guy who will later enter an amorous relationship with Emira. To her credit, Reid doesn’t just dwell on racial profiling in her novel. Instead, she deftly explores multiple contemporary themes, like implicit racial bias, social media, class, friendship, and motherhood.

In lieu of preaching, Ried gently satirizes the wokeness that seems prevalent in contemporary America. Alix is a striver whose career success seems to rest on the thinnest of threads. She is totally self-involved yet sees herself as racially enlightened. Following the racial profiling incident, she begins to fixate on getting to know Emira and showing her just how woke she really is. Kelley Copeland is likewise lacking in self-awareness. Most of his friends are black and he thinks this qualifies him to tell Emira how to lead her life. He talks at her but doesn’t listen much. Ried gives Alix and Kelley a most improbable past connection that leaves each convinced the other is a racist. This leaves each with conflicting views about what is best for Emira.

Ried’s most engaging narrative twists and turns around the profiling video, an embarrassing Thanksgiving dinner, high school hijinks, failings in child rearing and lots more. Ultimately, she holds a mirror up to our faces to gently demonstrate some of the subtleties of contemporary American racism.

LibraryThing member JennyNau10

Emira is a twenty-five-year-old college graduate who, for one reason or another, hasn't quite figured out her career plans and so she works a couple of jobs to get by. One night she babysits Briar, wealthy and white Alix's daughter, and then gets confronted by a security guard at a supermarket,

accusing her of kidnapping the white child. That sets the stage for the rest of this novel, which twists around in ways I never expected. Alix and her husband are horrified and repeatedly awkwardly apologize to Emira, only making things worse. Throw in the guy who witnessed and videoed the exchange at the store, and although Emira wants to forget it, none of the white people involved will let her.

LibraryThing member bell7

Emira, a young black woman in the Philadelphia area, babysits for the Chamberlains, a well-off white family with an adorable toddler, Briar, whom Emira adores. One night, they ask her to come over and take Briar out of the house while the police arrive. While in a grocery store, she and Briar are

stopped by a security guard who accuses Emira of kidnapping - and all this is captured on video.

The aftermath of the security guard's accusation is... not what I expected. Rather than an immediate blow up, Emira takes steps to make sure the video doesn't get out, and she wants to keep quiet about it. We get Alix Chamberlain's past and point of view, wanting to cozy up to Emira and make friends, as well as Emira's struggle to figure out what she wants to do with her life. At some point, I got frustrated with just about every character except poor Briar, and it was a sudden shock at one point to realize that only one or two characters, at most, were older than me (I wondered if that was some of the source of frustration). We see ways in which the white characters are well-meaning but totally blind to their own racism, and rewrite their own histories to make themselves look better. All this wrapped up in an easy narrative that kept pages turning fast.

LibraryThing member thewestwing

Enjoyed the storyline and the characters but thought the ending was a little lacking but I can’t put my finger on why. Would read more by this author though.

LibraryThing member Mercef

This was more a 2 and a half star read for me, bumped up to a 3. I’m really not sure what all the fuss is about with this book. Apparently quite popular at the moment but it might be that I’m the wrong demographic to be reading this. The story centre on an African-American twenty-something

woman who works as a babysitter for a rich, white woman. I became a little jaded at all the “check your privilege” references. And like I’ve complained of before, the accolades on the book cover are so over the top that nothing could possibly live up to my expectations - “firecracker debut”, “couldn’t put this down”, “twists that made me gasp out loud”. Seriously?! None of the above.

LibraryThing member bfister

Very enjoyable novel that handles persistent racism with a light touch. A black babysitter working for a self-made white influencer-celebrity-entrepreneur type meets a woke white guy who films a racist incident in a tony grocery store when a rent-a-cop confronts the babysitter, assuming she has no

business with her three-year-old white charge. Everything else hinges on that moment and the coincidence (okay, major ask for readers to buy it but hey, it's fiction) that the employer and the white guy had a major breakup in high school that lingers.

Things I found interesting: parent-child-child care worker relationships. The mom is very much a mom but she's also rich and busy and has a new baby and doesn't realize she's neglecting her precocious and eccentric three-year-old (who bonds deeply with the babysitter). The vacuousness of the celebrity that makes the employer wealthy. The mixture of charm and obnoxiousness that is so frequently part of male white self-aggrandizing wokeness. The power and limits of female friendships. The fact everyone is so sure they know exactly what the babysitter should be doing with her life when really she just wants time to figure it out for herself - though it puts her on the constant edge of financial disaster and makes her feel unfairly ashamed of herself. The role viral social media plays in lives as a kind of spectator team sport.

I'm happy to have novels that are fun to read and yet help unpack everyday racism in such an accessible way. I know some reviewers say "I didn't like the characters" but I liked the way the author gave all of them such a rich mix of being like folks we know who have some endearing qualities and mostly good intentions while also being deeply clueless and selfish. Like we are.

LibraryThing member TooBusyReading

This book had a lot of potential. A woman of color who hasn't quite found her way in life is a babysitter, not a nanny, for a white woman. And racial profiling happens pretty soon in the story. I enjoyed reading about the characters, and it was interesting to read how Emira, the babysitter, acts

around her supportive friends as opposed to her employer. And it's equally how her employer tries to be a friend, wants to prove she is not racist.

This book has a good premise. I did enjoy it. Briar, the toddler with a growly voice, was delightful. But the social issues, as important as they are, sometimes got lost in the chick-lit feel. Not being much of a chick-lit kind of person, I didn't enjoy this as much as I expected. On the other hand, I'm not sorry I spent time listening to it.

LibraryThing member bookworm12

Emira is a young blank woman in her 20s. She works as a babysitter for Alix and feels directionless. An encounter with a security guard in a supermarket sets things in motion that she wasn’t expecting. I love that there is no hero in this book. It opens up conversations about race and gender

without offering easy answers. It’s a tricky balance, but what makes it work is the fact that the characters feel like real people. They are layered and complicated, selfish, conflicted, and vulnerable. Motherhood, romantic relationships, supportive friends, each issue is swirled together just as it is in real life.

LibraryThing member tibobi

The Short of It:

A slow build but once I got into it it was like a time bomb ready to go off.

The Rest of It:

For once, I read a buzzy book when everyone else was reading it too. Such a Fun Age is making the rounds and getting a lot of praise. It was selected for Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club and

although I’ve not read all of her selections, the ones I have read have been really good. This was no exception.

Emira is at a club celebrating with her friends when her boss calls her to ask if she can possibly watch her daughter due to an emergency. One, it’s late. Two, she’s dressed for the club. Three, she’s been drinking. Although she explains this to her boss, the desperation on the other line wins out.

Minutes later, Emira finds herself with three-year-old Briar in an upscale supermarket checking out the nuts, dancing in the aisle, doing whatever it takes to keep the kid occupied while her mother, Alix, tends to her emergency. Just minutes into their visit, they begin to draw the attention of other shoppers. Emira, a young black woman, and Briar, a young white child, wandering the aisles so late at night seems out of place. So much so, that a security guard begins to question her. Emira explains that she is Briar’s babysitter, which is the truth but she knows how it looks. Things escalate. That is where the story begins.

This is one of those slow-build books. Conflict is everywhere but you know something big is coming and as the story plays out, the one word that comes to mind is EXPLOSIVE. This is a book about race but also fetishsizing race, which I thought was interesting.

Two things stood out for me. One, the story is a little gritty. Not overworked or polished which I liked very much. The author did a good job of portraying each character’s POV. None of these characters are perfect and you won’t find yourself siding with any of them. They all play a role in how the rabbit falls down the hole. Two, the portrayal of Briar, the young child seemed a little off. She’s critical to the story but her observations were often not believable to me and they took me out of the narrative at times.

However, there is a lot to think about here and you will find yourself eagerly flipping those pages towards the end because it’s like a train wreck and you can’t possibly look away. I wouldn’t say it was a perfect story but I don’t think it was meant to be.

For more reviews, visit my blog: Book Chatter.

LibraryThing member bookchickdi

Kiley Reid's debut novel, Such a Fun Age, opens with Emira, a twenty-five year old black woman out celebrating her friend's birthday. She gets a call at 11pm from Alix Chamberlain, the woman she works for taking care of Alix's two young children. Alix has an emergency and offers to pay Emira double

and her cab fare if she can come right away and take her toddler Briar out of the house for a little while.

Emira needs the money, so she leaves the party and picks up Briar and takes her to the fancy neighborhood grocery store that's open late. Emira is dressed for a party, and when she and Briar got to the grocery store, Emira's friend is along too, and the three of them have a dance party in the frozen food aisle.

Another customer, a white woman, smiles at them, but soon the store security guard comes over and asks Emira why she is with this child this late at night. The woman decided that Emira may have kidnapped Briar and notified the security guard.

Emira calmly tries to explain that she is the babysitter, but when the security guard accuses her of kidnapping, another man in the grocery store takes out his phone and films the altercation. Emira is embarrassed and angry, and she calls Mr. Chamberlain, who comes to the store to straighten it all out.

The opening scene plays out like so many stories we have seen on the news in the past year, and from there we get a deep dive into Emira's life and the life of Alix, a mommy blogger who gave up her friends and job in New York City to follow her husband's career as a TV news reporter to Philadelphia.

Reid draws us into the lives of these two women as they intersect. Emira is a college graduate who can't find a job that pays enough, so she babysits for Briar. She adores the curious little girl, and feels that Alix pays more attention to her new baby because she cannot understand her own toddler.

After the grocery store incident, Alix wants to make things right for Emira, get to know her better, make her part of the family, but she doesn't know how to go about that. Their two lives couldn't be any different- Alix a white woman of privilege, Emira a young black woman, working as a babysitter without health insurance, a 401K, or vacation pay.

Things culminate on Thanksgiving when Alix invites Emira and her new boyfriend, the man who took the video, to dinner. All hell breaks loose when Alix realizes who he really is.

Reid writes an engrossing story about race, class, friendship and privilege. She puts you into the shoes of Emira and Alix, and often times it is an uncomfortable fit. I cringed at some of the things Alix said and did, and it does make the reader become more introspective of one's own behavior. You also get to see how stressful it is living moment-to-moment, paycheck-to-paycheck. Not everyone is benefitting from the record-breaking stock market bull run.

If you like a novel that will make you think inside of a fascinating plot, I recommend Such a Fun Age. Reese Witherspoon recently chose it for her Hello Sunshine book club.

If you read Stephanie Land's nonfiction book, Maid, give Such a Fun Age a read.

LibraryThing member KatyBee

With hopeful anticipation created from hearing good reviews, I sat down last evening to start Kiley Reid’s debut novel, “Such a Fun Age”. Some hours later, I realized it was past 1 a.m., and I’d finished the entire book in one sitting. I can confirm that it was worth losing sleep over. This

is truly an excellent book - real, honest, and written with a sure hand for dialogue and with amazing, nuanced character development.

The story centers around Emira, a 26-year old black women who is trying to figure out what to do with her life. She is a part-time babysitter for a well-off white couple, Alix and Pete, who have two little girls, a lovely toddler named Briar and baby Catherine. Alix is an influencer who has built her brand/reputation on reviewing products and inspiring young women. The story spins out when Emira is asked to take Briar out of the house late one night due to a domestic issue. They go to a neighborhood grocery store where a white security office officer and customer mistakenly confront her and assume she has taken a white child. The incident is caught on video by a white man named Kelley, and this encounter provides some of the backdrop for the rest of the story.

What a fascinating set of relationships this book provides! Both Emira and Alix have a group of supportive female friends that are enjoyable to read about. The employer-employee relationship between Alix and Emira becomes weirdly awful and always compelling. Emira and Kelley begin talking and then dating after the grocery store incident, and their relationship is intriguing and well written. My favorite part of the book was the warm and loving relationship between Emira and little Briar, a beautifully described toddler who is funny and perceptive and elevated as an important part of this story – it’s a very moving depiction.

This is great novel on many levels – it includes multiple themes such as families and parenting, the importance of friendships, issues of class and racism, coming-of-age stories, societal pressures and consumerism, and more. It also has an interesting plot twist! Overall, “Such a Fun Age” is a pleasure to read.

LibraryThing member bookappeal

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this book. The experience of reading it is unsettling - my opinions of each character kept shifting - but Reid's exploration of race relations in the modern US is nonetheless a compelling, enjoyable and even humorous read. Two-year-old Briar is a talker and

some wacky statements come out of her mouth! The life experiences of the main characters (a wealthy, privileged, white mother of two and a young black woman struggling to determine her life path) are so foreign to me that it was difficult at times to relate to their motivations, feelings and reactions. I can't decide if Reid presents the moral and ethical questions fairly but her portrayal of characters in an interesting situation provides plenty to consider and debate.

LibraryThing member bugs5

I enjoyed this book but agree with other reviewers that the people weren't all that likeable and rather stereotyped. I was disappointed because I really liked the idea of the book. The writing was easy and a fast read.

The cursing was excessive (mostly J/JC). When the author used JFC, as a Christian

reader, that did it for me. I did not finish the book.

LibraryThing member froxgirl

Here's a Black woman's take on a white woman's take on friendship with Black women, and it's a gem. Many white people see their Black friends as trophies, as proof of how woke they are. In this era, no one would ever say, "Some of my best friends...", but they would be thrilled to say, "My friend

Tamika...", because why would any Black woman be friends with a racist? Nu uh, girlfriend! Alix, trending Philadelphia blogger and mother of two, hires Emira to babysit so she can write her book. Emira has been floundering since college graduation, and her three best friends seem to be adulting much better than she. Problem is that she is very attached to little Briar, a very engaging three year old. A combination of incidents, from an on-air ill-conceived, racially-charged comment by Alix's newscaster husband to Emira’s confrontation with a security guard in a Whole-Foods-type store, lead to a series of dumb missteps by Alix, who is compelled to win Emira's esteem in the stupidest possible ways. Emira just cannot get revved up until she realizes what Alix is up to. And then there's the Kelley Konnection – he’s the handsome white guy who is Emira's new boyfriend and was also Alex's, sixteen years ago when they were in high school.

Both of the main characters are aggravating in their own ways, Emira with her passivity and Alix with her lack of self-awareness, but together they constitute a wonderful read, filled with humor and astute analysis of white upper middle class entitlement.

Quotes: "Was it a completely inappropriate time to clarify, So you think I'm pretty?"

LibraryThing member mplantenga11

This was a good audiobook to listen to at this time with the BLM movement in full swing. I'm aware of the discrimination that still sadly occurs in this world but hearing it in this story and seeing how people of different races and backgrounds reacted to it was still unsettling.
Overall this was

an okay book, I felt like the plot wasn't that exciting. I think my favorite part was the Thanksgiving scene because the reactions of Alix and her friends when they see Kelly was described hilariously.

LibraryThing member muddyboy

This is a n
This novel is a movie waiting to happen and I can see why it is a Reese Book Club selection . The books centers on Emira a young African American lady who gets a job babysitting a three year old (and later a baby) . Through a series of events she must decide whether to keep her job or

her boyfriend (or dump both). The driving event is one late night due to an emergency she takes her charge to an upper class grocery where she is accused of kidnapping the child by a customer and a security guard. She is black and the child is white and someone takes a video of the whole encounter which will have lasting repercussions. A very thought provoking book on race and relationships.

LibraryThing member brakketh

An updated comedy of manners focused on the awkwardness of race-relations in America. Wonderful read and insightful in equal measure.

Awards

Booker Prize (Longlist — 2020)

Audie Award (Finalist — Fiction — 2021)

Independent Booksellers' Book Prize (Shortlist — Fiction — 2021)

The British Book Industry Awards (Shortlist — [2021])

Young Lions Fiction Award (Finalist — 2020)

VCU Cabell First Novelist Award (Finalist — 2020)

Australian Book Industry Awards (Shortlist — 2021)

BookTube Prize (Octofinalist — Fiction — 2020)

NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work (Nominee — Debut Author — 2020)

NPR: Books We Love (2020)

Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year (Debut Fiction — 2020)

Reese's Book Club (2020-01 — 2020)

Chicago Public Library Best of the Best: Adults (Selection — 2020)

ISBN

052554190X / 9780525541905

More

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