Come and Get It Is a Satirical Ode to the Complicated, Imperfect Lives of College Women

It seems best to put it out there fairly plainly: Anyone looking at Reid’s second novel, Come and Get It, and expecting a carbon copy of her buzzy debut, Such a Fun Age, is going to be disappointed. Her first novel, which followed the story of a Black babysitter accused of kidnapping her white charge, was breezy and propulsive, a Reese’s Book Club pick that wrestled with issues of race and class in a way that was entertaining, if not always particularly deep. Her second book is busier and more ambitious, edging on overstuffed at times, and is packed with so many subplots that they almost can’t help but collide together clumsily by the story’s end. 

This is a novel that’s primarily centered around money: who has it, who needs it, the power dynamic its presence or absence introduces into relationships, and how affluence affects not just your opportunities but your attitude in life. Especially in college, where young women who can afford to pledge a sorority or spot a round of drinks at the bar for friends are living very different lives from those who pinch pennies or have part-time jobs.

Set in a dorm for transfer students at the University of Arkansas, Reid’s story is grounded in the specificities of a particular place and campus culture. (Anyone who has gone to a school in the South knows what I mean, here.) The book primarily revolves around  Millie, a 24-year-old Black RA in her senior year after taking time off to care for an ailing parent. Hard-working and industrious, Millie has fallen in love with Fayetteville and is feverishly saving to buy a house, and it is ultimately her limited income that brings her into contact with Agatha, a visiting professor and journalist who’s working on a book about young Southern women and weddings. But after interviewing several of the girls in Millie’s dorm, who talk about “practice paychecks” and “fun money” and getting paid by their parents’ businesses for jobs they rarely worked, Agatha switches topics. She’s fascinated by their attitudes toward money and the things they deem worth spending it on. She even offers to pay Millie to help her facilitate more interviews with these girls, which ultimately turns into weekly eavesdropping sessions in her dorm room, where Agatha takes in the residents’ commentary unknown and unfiltered before changing their names and selling their stories to Teen Vogue.

The many ethical dilemmas posed by this premise would likely be enough to power the book entirely on its own. Instead, Reid digs into the lives of half a dozen other characters: Agatha’s initial interviewees Jenna, Casey, and Tyler, hilarious on-the-nose examples of a very specific subset of moneyed Southern twentysomethings who find themselves embroiled in a prank war with Millie. Tyler’s roommates, Peyton, a cooking-obsessed loner, and Kennedy, who changed schools after a traumatic incident devastated her emotionally. Millie’s fellow RAs, overachiever Joanie, blase Collete, and Ryland, who is gay and trolls Fayetteville for places giving out free samples. 

From its first pages, Come and Get It is a very different kind of book from Reid’s breakout debut. This sophomore effort is low on stakes and heavy on character, primarily interested in exploring the dynamics between the various young women at its center and deconstructing how race, class, and sexuality intersect within their college experiences. Following roughly half a dozen main characters, the book’s overarching plot—and the way these characters’ stories weave in and out of one another’s—can occasionally feel a bit thin. There’s no one particular inciting incident they’re all responding to, some characters are afforded considerably more depth than others, and the book most often feels like a compelling slice of life drama than anything else. But Reid still manages to spin the lives of those at the story’s center—their layered interactions, their messy dreams, even the specifics of speech patterns and accents, into a compelling whole. 

Reid’s prose is a mix of sympathy and satire, both respectful of the very real anxieties her characters wrestle with and bitingly honest about both the little cruelties they purposefully visit upon one another and the complicated ways that money and status influence their lives and relationships with one another. As a sociological expose of sorts, Come and Get It feels thematically timely, as ideas of money and privilege and higher education collide in ways ranging from student loans to scandals. 

But Reid’s at her most compelling in the small moments, perfectly capturing the awkwardness faced by roommates who aren’t really friends, the desperation a student feels to find a way to fit in with those around them, the pettiness of everyday grudges and slights. The whole may not always be greater than the sum of its parts here, but wow do some of those parts shine. 

Come and Get It is available now wherever books are sold. 

Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyMB