Book review: Come and Get It by Kiley Reid

An immersive campus novel about friendship and failings from the author of Such a Fun Age

Come and Get It centres around a group of women at the University of Arkansas. Millie is an RA (resident assistant) in a student dorm, earning extra money to support her studies. Millie is slightly older than her peers as she took time out during a family crisis. This has led to her searching for stability and she dreams of buying a house and she is saving hard. Millie is positive, pragmatic and conscientious.

Among her charges is a young woman called Tyler, who is quite a dominant character, both to her room-mates and to her friends beyond the dorm. A seemingly minor exchange between Tyler and Millie at the beginning of term regarding the allocation of a shared room sets in chain a series of events.

Into this mix comes Agatha, an academic and author. She has previously encountered Tyler and her friends as part of a research project and is fascinated by their language and opinions around money and culture. She asks Millie to help her further her research in exchange for payment. Agatha’s proximity to the students and her complicated personal life soon lead her to increasingly unethical behaviour.

I was quite surprised to see that some reviewers saw Come and Get It as a slog. I found it absorbing from the start. While there are a large number of characters and we do get their backstories, I was intrigued to see how this diverse cast would come together (there’s some light foreshadowing that reassures you they will). The backstories themselves contain elements of drama and the pacing of revelation is done well.

The spine of the story is a series of (mostly) minor transgressions and omissions which escalate into a dramatic event. At its heart is the question of who gets punished and who gets away with it. This isn’t always obvious – while class, race and gender play their part, there are also less quantifiable forces in play, such as popularity, temperament and sheer luck.

Come and Get It is also a perceptive study of friendship and the way it shapes our perceptions of others and ourselves. Tyler is particularly fascinating. She’s not a bully, she’s not even overtly unkind, and she can show surprising charm and insight on occasion. She isn’t a beauty or obviously privileged, she is just such a strong personality that she exerts a powerful gravitational pull on those around her.

Mirroring the reign of Tyler is Millie’s new friendship group of fellow RAs. Suddenly Millie feels able to relax her persona of conscientious good cheer and join in their irreverence, but this leads her to make lapses as she finds her loyalties in conflict.

I raced through Come and Get It, intrigued to see how it would all come to a head. The resolution left me feeling satisfied and unsettled in equal measure.

I received a copy of Come and Get It from the publisher via NetGalley.
View Come and Get It on Goodreads