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 …
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.
A quick read and a solid debut that deftly weaves in humour while tackling serious and relevant social issues. Two POVs were done well for the most part, but the main protagonist could be more developed and the secondary POV becomes really unsympathetic rather quickly. (As does the main protag, in fact, but for other reasons.) It was clearly written with a screen adaptation in mind. Some bad dialogue and missed opportunities, and an unsatisfying ending, but still a fun read.
The first time I saw this book, I skipped over it because of its boring cover/title. Then I heard a quick synopsis, which sounded interesting, so i added it to my tbr. It still took more than a year to actually start reading it because it never grabbed my eye while looking for something to read. That was a mistake because I actually really liked this and was the kind of book where when I wasn't reading it, I was thinking about how much longer until I could get back to reading it.
Dieses Buch hat mich ein wenig irritiert - Rassismus in all seinen Ausprägungen scheint dieses Jahr extrem viel Platz auf meinen Leselisten einzunehmen. Insofern fand ich es interessant, hier zwei weiße Protagonisten zu sehen, die völlig überzeugt sind, nicht rassistisch zu sein, allerdings auf eine verquere Art genau das sind - und dabei den Splitter im Auge des Gegenübers sehen, nicht aber den Balken im eigenen Auge.
Allerdings wirken alle Figuren auf mich künstlich, einschließlich der Protagonistin und ihren Freunden, das kleine Mädchen, dass sie betreut, wirkt auf mich absolut unglaubwürdig für eine Dreijährige (und ich habe wirklich merkwürdige Dreijährige kennengelernt).
Insofern - spannender Ansatz, aber in der Ausführung für mich leider nicht wirklich gelungen.
I’m giving this 3 stars because it’s competent. I don’t have anything to complain about but for a book that supposedly explores questions around race, it’s pretty bland. Very low stakes. The book seems almost allergic to exploring actual conflict, as everyone involved spends most of the book convincing themselves everything is fine. I suppose that makes it more comfortable than other books that deal with these issues, I just can’t imagine why anyone would want to be comfortable when considering them. The person I would recommend this book to doesn’t exist.
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. returnreturnThings 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 …
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. returnreturnThings 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.returnreturnI'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.
Mel told me she liked it, and wanted to talk to me about it
## What I liked about it ##
Nuance of character. Alix maintained a little bit of likability and sympathy right up to the very end.
Briar was cute as hell. I usually don't like the precocious kid trope but I guess it worked well here because she wasn't especially precocious. She was just a normal 3 year old.
## One thing I want to remember ##
The feeling of great sadness at the end when Emira spelled out why everybody in this book was miserable: "And some days, Emira would carry the dread that if Briar ever struggled to find herself, she'd probably just hire someone to do it for her."
Kelly relied on black people and black culture to define himself. …
Everybody's the hero of their own story.
## Why I picked it up ##
Mel told me she liked it, and wanted to talk to me about it
## What I liked about it ##
Nuance of character. Alix maintained a little bit of likability and sympathy right up to the very end.
Briar was cute as hell. I usually don't like the precocious kid trope but I guess it worked well here because she wasn't especially precocious. She was just a normal 3 year old.
## One thing I want to remember ##
The feeling of great sadness at the end when Emira spelled out why everybody in this book was miserable: "And some days, Emira would carry the dread that if Briar ever struggled to find herself, she'd probably just hire someone to do it for her."
Kelly relied on black people and black culture to define himself. Alix desired forgiveness and approval of black people.
Emira herself struggled to find herself, but did so by staying true to the love she has for others and the love her friends have for her.
## Who I'd recommend it to ##
Anybody interested in the subtleties of race relations. Or anybody. It's a good book.
Reading tip: read the first 40% as fast as possible. It goes slow, but sets the stage for the next half, which goes super fast.
This stands atop the literary fiction I've read in 2020 as a refreshingly direct and compelling read with a lot of important themes for the 21st century literary fiction readers' customer base to digest. It feels to me like Kiley Reid wrote the Thanksgiving Dinner sequence as a short story initially - it's the only event in the book that gets multiple chapters devoted to it and the immediate fallout. As a result, there's definitely some racing-to-the-finish writing in the final part of the book, with a climax that feels theatrical at the expense of a really dialogue-rich confrontation. But overall, the writing for the protagonist, Emira, was excellent and the satirical jabs of Alix Chamberlain's privileged social circles was very satisfying.
I've found it difficult to describe this book. It reads with the ease of chick lit. It addresses big issues (racism, privilege, white savior complex, bias) without feeling heavy. The dialogue between Emira's friends feels effortless and real. My dings against this book: Alix is utterly unlikable. Even villains usually have something redeeming, but with Alix? Nope. And the ending was both a bit much and not enough. It felt like a departure from the rest of the book and didn't deliver the satisfaction I was hoping for.
I appreciate why so many people I know disliked this book. If it had come across more in the vein of light-hearted satire, rather than the SNL Weekend Update character of the woman you wish you hadn’t started a conversation with at a party yelling at the reader to “THINK ABOUT IT,” I do not think it would seem so condescending. But, alas. I’ll say that it does make two points well: (1) Everyone’s backstories, about which we may know nothing, color their current viewpoints and behavior in ways we (and they) may not understand, and (2) the American “gig economy” has come to expect an unreasonable level of emotional investment from workers, despite denying them basic job security, a living wage, or health insurance.
