Smart ... Complex ... Reid’s exquisitely calibrated tone, which slips tantalizingly between sympathy and satire. She’s so good at capturing both the syrupy support and catty criticism these young women swap, and yet she also demonstrates a profound understanding of their fears and anxieties ... The tension in Come and Get It builds slowly ... You’re in the presence of a master plotter who’s engineering a spectacular intersection of class, racism, academic politics and journalistic ethics.
Reid is a social observer of the highest order, knowing exactly when a small detail or beat of dialogue will resonate beyond the confines of the scene ... She never judges her characters. Her world, like the real one, is populated by people whose shortsightedness lives alongside good intentions ... With her perceptive eye and ear, Reid imbues her novel with the stuff, literally and figuratively, of life ... I found myself thinking of certain writers who have, over the years, elected themselves as 'capital C' Chroniclers of contemporary America. With this book, Reid demonstrates that she deserves a place in the running.
As a chronicler of college life, Reid is on shakier ground. The setup, though, is immaculate ... Given this arch school scenario, the book’s satire is surprisingly tepid. Reid gets the economics and anxieties of university life right; the trouble is that on the heels of a raft of memorable academic set novels and media — among them Rooney’s Normal People and Brandon Taylor’s Real Life — accuracy is not enough. The subject begs for precision and depth. The intersection of class and race, and the fact that white college girls in a theoretically progressive generation weaponize pejorative, racist terms like 'ghetto' are hardly revelations ... In writing that is clever, repetitive, and glib, aggressions micro and macro abound ... the novel’s satirical lens is blurred and flickering. Reid’s focus is trained on patterns and group identities — money, race, and class distinctions — and intergroup dynamics. But her observations are too slight for the wind-up — enough to fill the magazine profiles Agatha writes but not to carry a nearly 400-page novel with sluggish momentum. We need smart campus novels that bravely take on economic precarity and the vagaries of sex, race, and class, but I wanted more from this one. To read Come and Get It is to crave for something more to happen.
In a world of multifaceted, ubiquitous social interactions, Kiley Reid is a master at exploring the minutiae ... Entertaining gems of insight, hidden throughout the book, are not enough to overcome a haphazard narrative arc, central conflicts that are trivial and acerbic and characters whose inner lives still feel unknown to us by its conclusion. While Come and Get It offers meaningful cultural analysis and critique of young Black and white women's financial and consumer lives, it does not work as well as a coherent, unified novel.
At first, in fact, it seems like a fly-on-the-wall slice of life. Reid nails the anxiety about the future (and the present) for some students ... t seems for a while like nothing much is happening other than a forensic examination of these characters, but by the end, the small unkindnesses and transactional relationships and power differentials have brought the story to a pinpoint focus on the transformative power of this very crucial time in the lives of young people, and the responsibility others have to treat them with care ... The way it looks at more mundane parts of day-to-day life at the kind of school so many people actually attend but rarely read about makes it feel true — true in a way a thousand reported stories about inviting and uninviting campus speakers to the same tiny handful of places strangely can't.
This is a darker, more ambitious project. It aims to withhold easy satisfactions, to frustrate, to condemn. It’s only partially successful ... Reid seems to be focusing so strongly on the thematic play of money and power across this book that her plotting has become a little clumsy ... That Agatha and Millie would make such a decision feels especially jarring because one of Reid’s strengths is the merciless realism of her style. Reid has a knack for the rhythms of spoken dialogue, her characters’ sentences all punctuated precisely to reveal the secret insecurities guiding their uptalk, the nervousness that makes them rush their words together. Still, there are times when Reid leans so heavily on her strengths that they start to seem like crutches ... The big problem with Come and Get It is the opposite as the problem plaguing its sentences: it is too meaningful. Every event in this novel is so freighted with symbolic weight about the bigger story of American neoliberalism that it loses the specificity that would make it truly compelling.
Reid has a knack for descriptive phrases as we get to know all these characters ... Despite that gossipy setup, Reid creates a story with real weight. Her ear for dialogue — honed, no doubt, by the dozens of actual interviews she conducted with college students for this book — is finely tuned. It feels like you’re reading great gossip, but the characters come across as genuine, with real problems. Come and Get It is a fun, propulsive read that puts readers in a world most of them will have long since graduated from, but which provides an ideal window to explore deeper themes — from relationships to class and privilege to racism.
Busy ... The novel’s theme is clear and artfully expressed. And Ms. Reid...is very good at sketching a scene ... But the minutely—irritatingly—detailed back stories she gives her characters come at the expense of story, a diffuse story at that. Thus Come & Get It never quite hits pay dirt.
Feels a bit like watching a prestige TV series. There are expansive casts of characters, many of whom happen to be good-looking. The plots are pacy and compelling, motored by flashbacks and cliffhangers and twists, while also dealing with social issues – particularly race and class – that add intellectual heft. Dialogue is hyper-realistic ... All this spying serves as good fodder for a sequence of sitcom-like pranks and hijinks; Reid is a talented comic writer. But it also raises deeper questions about how we view the lives of other people, as material for our own consumption ... Juicy.
Reid brings her sharp gaze to the classic campus novel, and university life provides her with similarly rich material when it comes to deconstructing privilege ... Part of what has always made campus stories so captivating is that they show us character as a work in progress –because our university days have always been about working out our sense of self. But contemporary tales like Reid’s are a necessary reminder: this leisurely exploration is a luxury not everyone can afford.
Reid’s style...is laughable ... The novel builds to an unfeasibly violent dorm scene. In exploring the financial anxieties of young women, Reid gives just attention to an important but rarely examined topic. But her depictions too often feel like farce. And what’s the point in that?
This character-driven novel sets out to show how micro-aggressions cause fractures, and abuses of power have repercussions. Reid uses the stories of these women to showcase how money – whether you have it or not – corrupts society and hides truths. Along the way, Reid will make you laugh aloud, she will ensure you reflect on your own path, and she will make sure that you remember that it is not money that lasts, but rather your own self-belief.
Another comedy of manners ... Much of the novel’s dynamism comes from its zippy dialogue. It often feels verbatim, especially the joyously catty back and forth between Millie’s best mates, fellow RAs Ryland and Colette – playful counterpoints to her assiduousness ... Without doubt an absorbingly twisty page-turner. But it simply doesn’t measure up to the tight, exhilaratingly sharp Such a Fun Age. After excitedly coming to get it, what we are given is, in the end, something a little disappointing.
A deft exploration of how microaggressions can lead to macro consequences, Reid’s second outing will appeal to readers who enjoy slow-burn, character-driven novels.
A compelling, dialogue-driven novel ... Reid writes with enormous compassion, showing us flawed humans caught in systems outside of their control who are, mostly, doing the best they can.
A sardonic and no-holds-barred comedy of manners ... Reid is a keen observer—every page sparkles with sharp analysis of her characters. This blistering send-up of academia is interlaced with piercing moral clarity.
