Such a Fun Age opens with an all-too-familiar and uncomfortable scene. A young Black woman walking through an upscale grocery store with a small white child is confronted by security, who assumes she must have kidnapped the girl. A crowd forms, someone starts filming, and Emira—mortified, angry, and just trying to do her job—is thrust into the kind of viral spectacle that she never dreamed she'd find herself a part of. When the child’s father arrives and clears things up, Emira wants nothing more than to put the whole incident behind her. Little does she know, this is only the beginning.
From there, we get to know Emira more intimately. She's twenty-five, broke, drifting, and genuinely fond of watching little Briar, the daughter of her boss, Alix Chamberlain. Alix is everything Emira isn’t—wealthy, confident, and used to getting exactly what she wants. She’s built a brand on teaching women to claim their power, and when she learns about the grocery store incident, she becomes determined to “fix” things for Emira. With Emira approaching the birthday that will remove her from her parents’ health insurance plan, Alix sees an opportunity to guide her into a more stable future. But when the grocery store video resurfaces and draws someone from Alix’s past back into her orbit, both women find themselves barreling toward a collision that challenges everything they believe about themselves and each other.
Such a Fun Age finds Kiley Reid delivering a debut that deftly explores race, privilege, and the complicated dimensions of motherhood. She anchors the novel in characters who feel strikingly real and heightens the tension by making her two leads perfect foils. Alix is obsessed with the appearance of perfection—she has the perfect husband, the perfect career, and she’s determined to raise the perfect child. Emira, meanwhile, is both intrigued by Alix’s polished world and skeptical of it. She can imagine the appeal of that kind of stability, even sees flashes of a future she might want for herself, yet she can’t shake the suspicion that the whole thing is built on something hollow. That tension makes for compelling drama that kept me glued to the pages.
Reid strikes a remarkable balance between thematic depth, character development, and narrative momentum, crafting a story that challenges you even as it propels you forward. And it all culminates in one of the most satisfying, karmic endings I’ve read in ages. This is a fantastic debut from an author clearly just beginning to make her mark on the literary world.
For more information, visit the author's website, Amazon, and Goodreads.
(2025, 96)
