Kiley Reid’s “Come and Get It” is like a Burn Book: Exciting, Juicy, and Full of Secrets https://ift.tt/XWHhQv1
Kiley Reid’s new novel, Come and Get It, is centered around the many, seemingly miniscule exchanges of money and power in a 2017 University of Arkansas dormitory building. Millie Cousins, a senior resident assistant (RA) at Belgrade Dormitory, is focused on graduating with a job and house until she meets Agatha Paul, a visiting professor hoping to find her next great book idea in Millie’s residence. While Millie attempts to juggle her side jobs and an intensifying relationship with Agatha, tensions at the dorm morph from petty gossip to life-altering mistakes.
Come and Get It is dense yet sharp in its cast of characters and the multitude of messy, delicious character interactions. While the college and dormitory environment has a complex web of relationships, Reid lays it out surprisingly uncomplicatedly. In the first chapter, we see this plainly. Agatha arrives at Belgrade to be greeted by Millie, who has gathered three of her residents to be interviewed. As the novel goes on, we can see leaves on branches — Kennedy, a junior transfer student who has come to the University of Arkansas in the hopes of enrolling in Agatha’s creative writing class; Colette, Millie’s co-resident assistant; and Robin, Agatha’s dancer ex-girlfriend.
As lead characters, Millie and Agatha are very much foils of each other regarding their backgrounds, both of which are told in extensive flashbacks. Where Millie is seen as young, bright, and shiny, Agatha is seen as older, wiser, and more worldly. Where Millie had taken the previous school year off to care for her sick mother, Agatha offers to marry her ex-girlfriend to cover a sudden medical expense. Where Millie is frugal and careful with her money so she can buy a house after graduating, Agatha has plenty of money and has the privilege of floundering in her efforts to find the next subject of her book. Between the two of them, there seem to be enough issues to fill their own books, but together, their relationship gets even more entangled not only with the complex power dynamics of their differing ages, races, and employment statuses but also in how they interact with and perceive the residents at the dorm.
It’s easy to see how Mille and Agatha could have their more shallow perceptions of the people around them — Colette doesn’t care about her job as an RA because she turns off the ringer for the RA hotline, so Millie feels like she has to do everything. Kennedy seems stuck up because she doesn’t want to wash her dishes and has a single room in the suite with her own coffee cart, so it feels okay to joke about playing a small prank on her to deal with it. Tyler, another Belgrade resident, describes Millie as “ghetto,” so Agatha feels justified in writing about her in a botched Seventeen Magazine column about how students spend money at school. One of the most fascinating things about the novel is how these small assumptions lead to tension between roommates, RAs, and professors that seem insignificant and common but eventually snowball into incidents that add more and more fuel to the pyre of the novel’s very shocking climax.
By the time I got to the end of Come and Get It, I found myself going back through each interaction, poring through the first few chapters of the novel and wanting to believe that I’d found the spot where the plot train started to derail. It makes the novel feel juicy, like sifting through Belgrade Dormitory’s version of a Burn Book and making every interaction between the characters fraught with unsaid assumptions.
FICTION Come and Get It
By Kiley Reid
G.P. Putman’s Sons
Published January 30, 2024
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