Lauren Bufferd

FictionSpeculative FictionDystopian Fiction

Private Rites

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Julia Armfield’s Private Rites is part speculative novel, part domestic drama, as three feuding sisters seek closure after their father’s death while the city they live in is slowly destroyed by heavy rains and flooding. 

Sisters Isla and Irene, and their much younger stepsister, Agnes, inhabit a London-like city where it has been raining longer than anyone can remember. All three are survivors of a traumatic upbringing: Their father, Stephen, was a harsh man, pitting the two older girls against one another and mocking their weaknesses. After divorcing Isla and Irene’s mother, Stephen, a notable avant-garde architect, quickly married again. But when Agnes was born, her mother disappeared, leaving all three girls to be brought up by their father. The sisters are resentful and jealous of one another, rarely getting together as adults. Bossy Isla is trying to keep her psychiatric practice going despite losing patients, and Irene spends her time scrolling through internet forums where people role-play the pre-apocalypse world: “I’d pick you up in my car because I have a car,” reads one post. Agnes, who’s used to drifting between sexual partners, meets a girl at the coffee shop where she works and is startled by the intimate relationship that develops. Meanwhile, as the rain continues, whole neighborhoods are lost to flooding, and their inhabitants are forced to move to higher and higher ground.

The fragile ties between the sisters further disintegrate after Stephen’s death. Harsh words are exchanged at Stephen’s funeral, and when the will is read, the two older sisters find that the family house has been left to Agnes, who doesn’t want it. The intense sibling drama can’t hide the fact that there are some very weird things going on besides the weather—the absence of their mothers, Agnes’ spotty memories and hazy dreams, and how strangers constantly recognize the three sisters when they are out in public. 

Private Rites excels as a spooky character study, moving seamlessly between the sisters and their partners and creating a rich narrative despite its brevity (barely over 200 pages). Following its clever echoes of King Lear (an overbearing father, three bickering daughters, endlessly howling storms) and all-too-believable evocation of climate apocalypse, the novel’s resolution unfortunately feels like a misstep. Until the end, however, Armfield goes deep into the damaged psyches of three unusual women who search for connection despite their father’s cruel legacy.

Private Rites excels as a spooky character study, with clever echoes of King Lear—an overbearing father, three bickering daughters, endlessly howling storms—and an all-too-believable evocation of climate apocalypse.
FictionPopular FictionHistorical Fiction

This Motherless Land

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Nikki May’s second novel, This Motherless Land, opens in Nigeria in the late 1970s after 9-year-old Funke Oyenuga’s comfortable world is shattered when her mother and younger brother are killed in a car accident. Her father folds under pressure from his extended Nigerian family and sends Funke to live with her maternal grandparents at a remote estate in rural England. Isolated and miserable, a victim of her aunt Margot’s racism and condescension, Funke strives to fit in, even dropping her Nigerian name and going by Kate. But the aggressions pile on: She’s sent to the village school while her cousins Liv and Dominic are enrolled in private education, and sleeps in the attic even though there is an extra bedroom. Funke’s grandparents, though grieving, are no match for Margot’s selfish sulking. Only adventurous, spunky Liv offers Funke sympathetic companionship. But as the girls grow up, societal pressures and concerns about money, school and status get in the way of their friendship. After another traumatic accident, Funke is packed up and sent back to Nigeria to live with the father who so cruelly sent her away. 

In alternating chapters, This Motherless Land follows Funke and Liv into adulthood. Liv falls into a pattern of dead-end jobs, drugs and casual sex, before getting sober and accepting steady work at a day care center, while Funke pursues a medical degree in Lagos and restarts her relationship with her father and his new family. Though rocky at first, her return to Nigeria reconnects Funke to the spirit of her mother as she realizes just how many people her mother’s life has impacted for the better. 

With clever references to Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, another novel that explores class, bad parenting and a beloved ancestral home, This Motherless Land reaches back to canonical English literature while presenting something new and fresh. Though there are a few hard-to-believe plot twists, especially toward the end, May’s warm way with her characters and her sharp eye for the details of life in Lagos, as well as the outsider’s view of English culture she presents, make this an engaging and thought-provoking family-centered novel about race and reinvention. 

Nikki May’s warm way with her characters and her sharp eye for the details of life in Lagos make This Motherless Land an engaging and thought-provoking novel about race and reinvention.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Intermezzo

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Intermezzo, Sally Rooney’s much-anticipated fourth novel, tells a story of loss and grieving as two brothers reckon with the death of their father in ways that threaten to fragment their already troubled relationship. 

Peter Koubek is a socially and professionally competent lawyer living in Dublin in his early 30s. Beneath his polished exterior, he is bereft after his father’s death, suicidal and self-medicating with liquor and pills. His brother Ivan, younger by 10 years and once a chess prodigy, is now a loner struggling to maintain his early promise. At a regional chess match, Ivan falls for 36-year-old Margaret, who manages the local art center, and they begin a passionate romance despite their age difference. When Ivan confides in his older brother, Peter’s response is rude and dismissive. He is ashamed to confess to Ivan that his own love life is complicated. Peter is involved with two women: Naomi, a college student and part-time sex worker, and Sylvia, his first love, who suffered a disabling accident that led to their breakup years before. Peter and Ivan have long been locked into a cycle of judgment and disapproval. Now, their exchange crosses a line that it seems neither can come back from. 

As is typical in a Rooney novel, most of the traumas that shaped her characters—the father’s death, Margaret’s difficult separation from her heavily drinking ex-husband, Sylvia’s accident—happened prior to the events of the story. Rooney’s focus is instead on the various ways her characters are trapped inside their pain and if they are even going to emerge emotionally intact, and she brings skills she has honed on dissecting romantic relationships to the brothers’ bond with powerful results. Rooney underscores Peter and Ivan’s differences by changing her style when the focus shifts between them: Ivan’s chapters are told in a conventional third person, while Peter’s are narrated in a dreamy, stylized stream of consciousness that echoes Rooney’s countryman James Joyce. A tight focus on the siblings allows Rooney to delve into ideas about birth order and masculinity, while the careful balance between the novel’s brisk pace and its quite fearless exploration of sexual desire makes Intermezzo Rooney’s most ambitious novel yet. 

The careful balance between Intermezzo’s brisk pace and its quite fearless exploration of sexual desire makes Sally Rooney’s fourth novel her most ambitious yet.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Creation Lake

Review by Lauren Bufferd

From a women’s prison in California’s Central Valley to an elite community in 1950s Cuba, novelist Rachel Kushner is a master of the singular setting and bold protagonist. Creation Lake is no exception and, in fact, raises the stakes with its cerebral take on the spy thriller. 

Brainy, ruthless and beautiful, Sadie Smith (not her real name, mind you), has made a career of undercover work exposing and identifying radical activists. Once an employee of the U.S. government, she’s gone freelance and is working for a foreign conglomerate, trying to push eco-protestors into committing acts of violence. Sadie’s latest mark is an artsy, privileged Frenchman, Lucien, who ‘met’ Sadie in Paris. Believing that their encounter was a happy accident, Lucien has asked Sadie to accompany him to a small village where his family owns property and his school friend Pascal leads Le Moulin, a small agricultural cooperative protesting corporate farming. Lucien hopes Sadie can help them translate their ideas for an English-speaking audience; Sadie’s goals are a bit different. 

The Moulinards of Le Moulin, a sketchy and disorganized bunch at best, draw influence from an older revolutionary, Bruno Lacombe, who communicates only through rambling philosophical emails sent from an underground cave. Skeptical of all modern interpretations of civilization, Bruno believes that cultivating our Neanderthal characteristics might be the only way to survive. Despite her cynicism, Sadie is drawn in by the purity of Bruno’s ideas and by the extreme choices he’s made for his life, choices that force her to reconsider her own. 

Creation Lake is no Emily in Paris: Sadie’s corner of France is stale baguettes, superhighways, cheap wine and Guns N’ Roses cover bands. Sadie herself is no less acerbic; her only weakness seems to be a reliance on booze and vanity over her surgically enhanced (but tastefully so, she reminds us) bosom. Kushner has taken the bones of the traditional spy novel and spun it into something that is as thought-provoking as it is fun, an intellectual thriller that deviously suggests there could be another fate for our disaster-bound species, should we take the time to think it through.

Rachel Kushner has taken the bones of the traditional spy novel and spun it into something that is as thought-provoking as it is fun, an intellectual thriller that deviously suggests there could be another fate for our disaster-bound species.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

The Modern Fairies

Review by Lauren Bufferd

“Cinderella,” “Puss in Boots” and “Rumpelstiltskin” are to this day some of the first stories we hear as children—and as we learn from Clare Pollard’s witty, sexy, historical novel, The Modern Fairies, they were all the rage in the court of Louis XIV.

The Modern Fairies is loosely based on a group of real-life salonaires who met at the home of Madame Marie d’Aulnoy, a woman with a troubled past that included imprisonment and a childhood marriage to a cruel aristocrat. D’Aulnoy and her friends were the original collectors and disseminators of well-known folk tales a century before the Brothers Grimm. Just like the princesses in their stories, they inhabited a world of wicked mothers, murderous husbands, locked towers and poisoned fruit.

The women are joined by Charles Perrault, a wealthy widower and advisor to the king, who went on to great fame as one of the first authors to publish a collection of fairy tales. Over the course of a cold winter, certain details of these contes de fées prove a little too close to the realities of court. There is a spy at d’Aulnoy’s gatherings, and meetings become more dangerous as love letters are misdirected, husbands discover cheating wives, and both the local clergy and the king’s chief of police are put on high alert for any whiff of scandal.

The Modern Fairies is arranged as a series of stories within stories, each fairy tale as light as a bonbon yet cleverly revealing aspects of the teller’s situation, whether a violent husband, younger lover or jealous rival. An all-knowing narrator, perhaps Pollard herself, pops up to offer commentary on the societal restrictions experienced by these noblewomen and to reflect on the subversive ties between tales told and lives lived. An award-winning poet and translator, Pollard has great fun with these stories and with the gossip, the flirtations and the sheer amount of sex at the court of Versailles. She demonstrates, too, how important these women were for documenting, embellishing and preserving a wealth of stories, and like them, plays her part in translating an oral tradition into a written one that we can continue to delight in.

An award-winning poet and translator, Clare Pollard has great fun with these cleverly revealing fairy tales told amid gossip, flirtations and sex at the court of Versailles.
FictionThrillerLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

Bright Objects

Review by Lauren Bufferd

A fatal accident, a cosmic visitor and a mysterious stranger all come together in a small Australian town in Ruby Todd’s dazzling debut, Bright Objects.

Young widow Sylvia Knight is recovering from the car accident that killed her husband and left her with serious injuries, both physical and psychological. Profoundly lonely, Sylvia works at the local mortuary, keeps her husband’s grave tidy and puts on a cheerful face for her mother-in-law, Sandy, whom she visits weekly. But she is haunted by sketchy memories of the night of the accident. Although another car was involved, nobody was arrested, but Sylvia believes she knows who was responsible. When word comes through her friend Vince that the police are closing the case, she falls into a deep depression and plans to take her own life. However, the appearance of a rare comet proves a distraction. When the comet’s discoverer, American astronomer Theo St. John, walks into the mortuary one day, Sylvia’s life takes a turn. Sylvia and Theo begin to find connection through shared meals and trips to the observatory to view the comet.

As the comet’s path draws closer to Earth, the mood in town shifts from celebratory to ominous. Joseph Evans, local meditation teacher and the heir of a wealthy family, sees the comet as a divine messenger and begins a series of mystical lectures that attract a cultlike following. He is eager to involve both Sylvia and Sandy, and Sylvia is distressed to see her mother-in-law drawn in by his promises. Conflicted in her feelings towards Theo and still wrestling with suicidal ideation, Sylvia finds her obsession with uncovering her husband’s killer pushing her to the edges of her sanity.

Bright Objects is a riveting literary thriller of obsession, vengeance and astronomy, but its most poignant gift may be its depiction of trying to make sense of life after tragedy.

Ruby Todd’s dazzling debut, Bright Objects, is a riveting literary thriller of obsession, vengeance and astronomy, but its most poignant gift may be its depiction of trying to make sense of life after tragedy.
FictionDystopian Fiction

This Great Hemisphere

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Mateo Askaripour’s second novel, This Great Hemisphere, is set 500 years in the future. The world is broken up into warring hemispheres, in which some of the inhabitants are born invisible and consigned to second-class citizenship (vizzers) while the manipulative Dominant Population (DPs, or dippies) rule with an iron grip.

Sweetmint, born invisible but imaginative and hardworking, is granted a highly sought-after internship with eccentric inventor Croger Tenmase. He encourages her scientific creativity, inspires her with obsolete objects like books and cameras, and teaches her to play tennis. But Sweetmint’s projects are shut down after a political assassination; the Chief Executive of the Northwestern Hemisphere is killed and Sweetmint’s long-lost brother Shanu is accused of the murder. Sweetmint is determined to locate Shanu, embarking on a quest that takes her far outside her community, forging new relationships and digging into the mysteries of her origins. Meanwhile, a power struggle ensues between ambitious politicians and ruthless generals as they vie to win the hearts and minds of the DPs in an upcoming election.

Part political thriller, part sci-fi, This Great Hemisphere revels in dystopian details with plausible roots: the ruling class controlling access to information, history and religion; the abundance of cheap processed food to keep the Invisibles in poor health; and the hypocrisy of the DPs between their pious pronouncements and secret sex clubs. At the same time, a secret Invisibles army, the “Children of Slim,” gains strength and power through collective knowledge of their shared legacy.

Askaripour’s breakthrough 2021 novel, Black Buck, was a wicked satire about a young Black man leaving his job as a barista for a position in a dubious tech start-up with cultish vibes. Similarly, This Great Hemisphere explores the allure of power and the lengths people go to gain and retain it, but it’s also a story about rebellion, resilience and the strength to shape your own future. It’s only when Sweetmint stops relying on false narratives that she can truly become the inventor she longs to be.

Part political thriller, part sci-fi, Mateo Askaripour’s second novel, This Great Hemisphere, revels in the dystopian details of a world where invisible citizens live under the control of the visible Dominant Population.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

Clear

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Welsh author Carys Davies (West) is still breaking into American readership, but it won’t take her long. Her latest historical novel, Clear, which thoughtfully explores a passionate friendship set against religious and civic changes in mid-19th century Scotland, is bound to expand her audience.

John Ferguson is a poor Presbyterian minister struggling to provide for himself and his wife, Mary. Desperate, he accepts a challenging mission to evict the remaining inhabitants of a remote Shetland island. Soon after his arrival on the island, he is injured in a fall while walking the cliffs, and his unconscious body is found by Ivar, the island’s sole occupant. Ivar brings John to his croft and nurses him back to health. Unable to understand one another (Ivar speaks a dialect of an archaic Scandinavian language called Norn) the two men form a tenuous friendship and gradually share enough words to communicate, though John postpones admitting to Ivar why he is really on the island. Long-isolated and having had only animals for company, Ivar takes pleasure in living with and caring for another person, while John, who continues to keep his mission a secret, begins to have second thoughts about the morality of his assignment. Meanwhile, back on the mainland, Mary grows uneasy with the nature of her husband’s undertaking and resolves to follow him, undertaking the difficult passage north on her own.

Davies sets her novel at the crux of two historical upheavals: the 1843 break of the Free Presbyterian Church from the Church of Scotland over the issue of landowners influencing the placement of clergy, and the final years of the Scottish Clearances, in which hundreds of rural poor were evicted to create additional grazing land for livestock. Davies is attentive to these details but keeps her focus on the relationships as the narrative moves seamlessly between the three main characters. With breathtaking descriptions of the natural world and a tender exploration of an unexpected friendship, Clear challenges readers’ expectations, offering a powerful and unusual story of connection.

Carys Davies sets Clear at the crux of two historic upheavals in 1800s Scotland but keeps her focus on her characters.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

The Safekeep

Review by Lauren Bufferd

The Safekeep, Yael van der Wouden’s debut novel, is set in 1961 rural Holland. At 30, Isabel is living in the house where she was raised after the death of her father forced the family’s move from the city and into a furnished house their uncle Karel found for them. Isabel lives a circumscribed and watchful life, guarding her dead mother’s things, suspecting the maid of theft and fending off the attentions of a flirtatious neighbor. Of her brothers, Louis and Hendrik, she is closer to Hendrik, although she disapproves of his friend Sebastian, suspecting a deeper connection. Of Louis and the steady stream of girlfriends he introduces to her, she thinks even less. Until Eva.

The siblings meet Eva at a dinner out. With her clumsy manners and brassy dyed hair, she hardly impresses, and Isabel is shocked when Louis brings her to the house, telling Isabel that Eva must stay there while he goes away on business and showing Eva to their mother’s room. Even under Isabel’s watchful eye, things begin to disappear—a spoon, a bowl, a thimble. More alarming to Isabel is the overwhelming attraction she feels to Eva, an attraction that spills into an obsessive, intensely depicted sexual relationship.

Van der Wouden may be familiar as the author of the 2017 essay “On (Not) Reading Anne Frank,” which explored what it means to be a Dutch Jewish writer and her complicated relationship to Frank’s legacy. As Isabel and Eva’s connection unfolds, van der Wouden’s true subject comes into view: how ordinary people were implicated in the ethnic cleansing that took place during World War II. Even in peacetime, Isabel and her peers are quick to notice people who appear different, with a fierce disgust that Isabel risks turning on herself as she comes to terms with her sexuality. A novel of redemption as much as revenge, The Safekeep has the pacing and twists of a thriller, while delving into the deeper issues laid bare by the Holocaust.

In Yael van der Wouden’s mesmerizing debut, The Safekeep, Isabel lives a circumscribed life in her dead mother’s house until her brother’s girlfriend comes to stay, alarming Isabel when an obsessive attraction develops between the two.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Sing, I

Review by Lauren Bufferd

A violent crime threatens the stability of the middle-class wife and mother at the center of Ethel Rohan’s Sing, I, a thoughtful novel about self-discovery and new beginnings.

Ester Prynn’s mother chose her name in the hopes of making her unforgettable. Ester lives with her husband, Simon, and their two teenage boys in coastal Northern California. Though amicable, the marriage has lost whatever spark it once had, and their younger son is so obsessed with video games he barely comes out of his room. On top of that, Ester’s father has advanced dementia, and she is estranged from her brothers, who remained in Montana after their mother’s death.

When a masked gunman robs the convenience store where Ester works, assaulting both her and her coworker, Crystal, Ester is badly shaken. She quits the store and gets another job as a hostess in an upscale hotel restaurant. Friends encourage her to pursue forgotten interests like singing, but she is haunted by her frustration that the gunman is still free and continuing to commit acts of violence. She’s also troubled by her unexpected attraction to Allie, a manager at the restaurant. Though Ester has long fantasized about an escape, are these feelings worth imploding her life over?

The strength of Sing, I is its focus on the ordinary and the relatable. Ester is a middle-class woman with close friends, but also beholden to her family and trapped in a low wage job. The robbery jumpstarts her out of her stupor and into the role of an active participant in her life. Other characters also struggle with the hardships of starting over, addiction and life’s disappointments.

Though it treads a predictable path, Sing, I nonetheless offers a gentle reminder of the hard-earned growth that can emerge from disruption and change.

In Ethel Rohan’s Sing, I, when a masked gunman robs the convenience store where Ester works, she is pushed to reexamine what she wants from life.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Anita de Monte Laughs Last

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Part campus novel, part ghost story, Xochitl Gonzalez’s second novel, Anita de Monte Laughs Last, fearlessly takes on racism and misogyny in the rarefied world of fine art and art history. 

Nodding to real-life Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta and her husband, minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, the novel opens in the late 1980s with the death of artist Anita de Monte. After a violent argument with her husband, Jack Martin, Anita was found on the sidewalk outside their apartment, leaving speculators to wonder—did she jump or was she pushed? As Andre was in his real trial, Jack is acquitted and continues his successful and lucrative career, while Anita’s art is all but forgotten. Ten years later, Raquel Toro is an art history major at Brown. Her working-class, Puerto Rican background makes her feel out of place at the university and even more so in her department, where she doesn’t fit in with the privileged “Art History Girls.” Fortunes change when Raquel begins dating art major Nick Fitzsimmons, whose wealthy parents have ties to New York’s major museums and galleries, and when her advisor enthusiastically supports Raquel’s senior thesis on Jack Martin’s career. 

The dynamic between Raquel and Nick mirrors the one between Anita and Jack, with both men trying to control their partner’s physical appearance, clothing and schedule through microaggressions and expensive gifts. As Raquel’s summer internship redirects her research to include Anita’s experience, Anita’s story, told in parallel chapters, takes a turn for the uncanny; she subtly haunts Jack from beyond the grave, transforming into a bat and shifting his meticulously displayed art works. Though told with humor and a light touch, Gonzalez doesn’t shy away from serious issues: the erasure of women from the art history canon and the racism often faced by first generation students of color at Ivy League colleges. As Raquel brings Anita’s groundbreaking sculptures to light, Anita de Monte Laughs Last boldly questions the choices behind what we are taught and demands that the complete story be disclosed.

Though told with humor and a light touch, Anita de Monte Laughs Last doesn’t shy away from serious issues: the erasure of women from the art history canon and the racism often faced by first generation students of color at Ivy League colleges.
FictionLiterary FictionFamily Drama

Behind You Is the Sea

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Behind You Is the Sea, Susan Muaddi Darraj’s debut novel, brings readers into the lives of three Palestinian families in and around Baltimore: the Salamehs, the Baladis and the Ammars. Generational disputes form the core of the novel’s action, which unfolds through weddings, graduations, unplanned pregnancies and funerals. Women’s issues are also at the fore, as each of the novel’s chapters, which function as linked stories, reveal families both divided and united by class, gender and traditional values.

In the opening chapter, “A Child of Air,” teenage Reema Baladi resolves to keep her baby, while refusing to marry her Puerto Rican boyfriend. In “Mr. Ammar Gets Drunk at the Wedding,” Walid, patriarch of the wealthy Ammar family, despairs at the lack of Arab traditions at his oldest son’s wedding to an American. “Ride Along” focuses on a police officer, Marcus Salameh, and the rift between his father and his sister, Amal, over Amal’s perceived dishonor, a rupture which grows deeper after the death of their mother.

Darraj deftly explores class tensions in the titular chapter: When the Ammars employ young Maysoon Baladi as a housekeeper, she is shocked by the couple’s indolence and their spoiled teenage kids, but flirts openly with father and husband, Demetri. In a later chapter, Demetri’s daughter Hiba moves in with her grandparents after an embarrassing incident in college and an unspoken but deeply felt lack of support from her parents. The final chapter “Escorting the Body,” the only chapter not set in the United States, sees Marcus fulfilling his father’s wish to be buried in his Palestinian village, a visit which reveals dramatic secrets about the life he left behind.

Behind You Is the Sea draws a composite portrait of Palestinian American families with sensitivity and humor, its linked stories breaking down stereotypes and embracing complexity.

Behind You Is the Sea draws a composite portrait of Palestinian American families with sensitivity and humor, its linked stories breaking down stereotypes and embracing complexity.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Come and Get It

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Kiley Reid’s sophomore effort Come and Get It is a compelling, dialogue-driven novel about consumption, desire and class set at a state university in 2017. Readers who enjoyed Reid’s debut, Such a Fun Age, will find themselves in welcome territory.

Millie, a woman whose college years were interrupted by helping an ill parent, has returned to the University of Arkansas as a 24-year-old senior, working as a resident assistant in her dorm. Mature and responsible, she fantasizes about Josh, her hunky supervisor, and is diligently saving to purchase a house. Agatha is a visiting faculty member in her late 30s, recently separated from a younger professional dancer who married her for health insurance. At the beginning of the semester, Agatha asks Millie to organize a small group of students for Agatha to interview as part of her research for a potential book on wedding traditions. What starts as an innocent gathering of information becomes a more complicated entanglement when Agatha begins paying Millie for access to the dorm to spy on the students’ personal conversations, which she then writes up as a series of demi-comic pieces for Teen Vogue. Meanwhile, a prank dreamed up by Tyler, the mean girl of the dorm, sparks a vengeful retaliation which threatens both Agatha and Millie’s livelihoods.

This reader’s advice is to follow the money, as much of Come and Get It is embedded in the details of ostensibly insignificant transactions. Reid prefers to serve her themes amid a frothy concoction of witty dialogue, campus capers and unrequited crushes, but underneath it all, her eye is firmly fixed on obsessive consumerism and intersecting issues of race and class. Though no crimes are committed, there are enough errors of judgment, blurred ethical lines and microaggressions to permanently alter the life trajectories of her characters. Yet Reid writes with enormous compassion, showing us flawed humans caught in systems outside of their control who are, mostly, doing the best they can.

Come and Get It is a frothy concoction of witty dialogue, campus capers and unrequited crushes, but underneath it all, Kiley Reid’s eye is firmly fixed on obsessive consumerism and intersecting issues of race and class.

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