Come and Get It

The lives of a visiting professor, a group of entitled scholarship students and their dormitory’s resident advisor collide and overlap until the friction triggers a combustion in the provocative new fiction from bestseller Kiley Reid. The action takes place in Fayetteville, and centres around the relationship between Agatha Paul, a creative non-fiction writer combining a teaching post at the University of Arkansas with research for a book on weddings and Millie Cousins, a 24-year-old marketing student and resident advisor who allows Agatha to eavesdrop on the students living in the dorm room adjoining her own. Although the unsympathetic renderings of Tyler—the de facto queen bee of the dorm room she shares with passive pedant, Peyton and coddled loner, Kennedy—and her friends Casey and Jenna make the young women villains on paper, the real bad behaviour comes from the adults in the story who really ought to know better. When the execution of a childish prank sets the main players at odds, it’s a tension-loaded countdown to the moment disaster strikes with almost resigned inevitability. Flipping between timelines, Reid injects context to inform the present-day actions and motives of her protagonists: the foundational weaknesses in Agatha’s relationship with her estranged wife, Millie’s desire for financial stability, the traumatising incident which ruptures Kennedy’s aspirations of young adulthood before it has really begun. The climactic final chapters dole out just desserts, but the moral ambiguity of each character puts the responsibility of answering the question of who is deserving and of what in the hands of the reader.