Leah’s ARC Review of “Come and Get It” by Kiley Reid

By: Leah

Originally posted on Leah’s Books.

Come and Get It

• Author: Kiley Reid
• Genre: Literary Fiction 
• Publication Date: January 30, 2024
• Publisher: G.P Putnam’s Sons

Thank you to NetGalley and G.P. Putnam’s Sons for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Plot Summary

From the celebrated New York Times bestselling author of Such a Fun Age comes a fresh and provocative story about a residential assistant and her messy entanglement with a professor and three unruly students.

It’s 2017 at the University of Arkansas. Millie Cousins, a senior resident assistant, wants to graduate, get a job, and buy a house. So when Agatha Paul, a visiting professor and writer, offers Millie an easy yet unusual opportunity, she jumps at the chance. But Millie’s starry-eyed hustle becomes jeopardised by odd new friends, vengeful dorm pranks and illicit intrigue. A fresh and intimate portrait of desire, consumption and reckless abandon, Come and Get It is a tension-filled story about money, indiscretion, and bad behavior.

Overall Impression

After Kiley Reid’s debut took the book world by storm, I have been eagerly anticipating her follow up. It’s been a long while, so I have to admit how curious I was to see what this new book would be about. 

To start with, this book centers around a relatively large cast of characters. We have the three students, Peyton, Casey, Kennedy, and Tyler; plus Millie, the senior residential assistant (RA), and her fellow RAs and supervisor, Josh; and on top of all of that comes Agatha with plenty of emotional baggage from a breakup with her ex, Robin.

The story itself focuses mainly on three characters—Agatha, Millie, and Kennedy, with the rest playing supporting roles in both present day and flashbacks to the past, allowing us to see their backstories at various points in the books. And while this book is clearly aiming to be a character-driven story, it winds up being more of one of those “no plot, just vibes” books that I’m seeing more and more often. I tend to prefer more plot-driven stories, I enjoy a character-driven story when it’s done well, but I need more than just vibes to enjoy a book. An inappropriate relationship develops between Agatha and Millie over the course of the story, but the connection never felt realistic, and there was never any discernible chemistry between the characters.

Reid brings her characteristic sharp wit to the story, writing banal exchanges between the students that felt realistic and humorous at times. There is a lot of layered complexity within the story that touches on race, socioeconomic class, and sexuality. She also discusses the strange dynamics that sometimes occur when multiple strangers are thrown into housing together in college, sometimes being forced to share their space for the first time, and the role that RAs play in helping college students adjust to being away from home.

I’m honestly not trying to write a hit piece on this book. Was it bad? No. If it was, I wouldn’t have finished it. It felt like more of a missed opportunity than anything else. The characters were interesting, but their development felt underdone. We could have gotten to know the characters so much better and see them grow, especially since there was so much to work with. For some of them, I would have liked to see their backstories earlier in the book, since it made it hard to connect with them finding out who they were so late. As for the story itself, there was so much potential there, but no plot ever really manifested, and the major plot points felt anticlimactic when they finally did occur. I found myself disappointed in the lack of likable characters, and the poor choices they consistently made. Ultimately, I could have just watched The Simple Life, although the characters in this story were more enjoyable, and I don’t regret the time spent reading this book.