It wasn’t that long ago that I started college. It was the first time I’d ever been surrounded by so many people of different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds to myself. My hometown—with its graduating class of 200—was relatively monolithic, and in cases where situations differed, we’d all known each other since preschool anyways. Even the unknown was known.

Kiley Reid’s second Book, Come and Get It, takes on the privilege gap so common at colleges by detailing a year at the University of Arkansas through three different perspectives. The first is Millie, a Black 24 year old RA who’s completing her senior year after taking the last year off to take care of her mother. The benefit of her gap year is that Millie was able to save up to buy a house, and she’s eager for any extra income she can find to help her on that journey.

Agatha is a Black 38 year old writer and professor from Chicago headed down to Arkansas to teach and research her next book after (sort of?) breaking up with her girlfriend. Agatha wrote her last book on funerals, and now she plans to write about weddings. It doesn’t take long for that desire to blow up. She doesn’t really want to write about weddings! Her first interviewees are Tyler, Casey, and Jenna, college juniors in Millie’s dorm. They’re interesting, but more for their views on money than weddings. This pivots Agatha’s focus entirely.

Kennedy is a White junior year transfer student, and one of Millie’s responsibilities as RA. Kennedy decorates her dorm straight out of a catalog on her very first day, and struggles to make friends from there. Kennedy’s Character often felt somewhat unnecessary to the plot as a whole. I do think she could have been cut out and it would have made an interesting book still. However, I love character driven books, and I think the ultimate goal of Kennedy’s character was to give us more insight into Tyler, Casey, and Jenna, the first of whom she lives with. Because of that, it was a worthwhile pursuit that managed to flesh Tyler out as a main character without ever giving her a perspective of her own.

The book is largely a series of flashbacks which accompany a slow crawl through the first semester of college. If you’re not someone who’s interested in purely character books, this will not sit well with you. Come and Get It is far slower than Such a Fun Age, and I think this difference has reflected in other reviews. For my part, I thought the characters were fascinating enough that I would have read 500 more pages about them. I want to see where they go from here, and I was rooting for (or against) them the entire book.

Reid has such a gift for creating dynamic characters, and the background of race and money discrepancies set up a high stakes narrative underpinning a fairly typical year. The book was so well written, and even when I found myself hating certain characters I couldn’t help but turn the (metaphorical, audiobook) pages faster, desperate to see what they did next.

I will most certainly be reading anything Reid writes next, and I highly recommend you take a look at this one when it comes out on January 30th.

Thank you to Libro.fm for providing me with an influencer ALC of this book.

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