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—and the highly anticipated new novel by acclaimed and award-winning author Kiley Reid. (Pub Date: Jan 30, 2024)
I was a great fan of Kiley Reid's previous release. It was so out of what I usually read, and yet it engraved in my memory in a way that I couldn't not celebrate a new work.
This one is also as good to read, but I'd say it's more like a 3.5 than a full 4 stars.
I'm not sure why the year was relevant to whoever did the official summary, but the story takes place in the University of Arkansas, told from the points of view of three different women: Agatha, a nonfiction author who is there as a visiting professor as she tries to write a new book and deal with a breakup, Millie, who is about to graduate and took the job as a resident assistant with the promise of being promoted to director, and Kennedy, who is one of the students Millie is in charge of but faces such a big trauma from her previous university, she can't get herself together. Agatha realizes the dorm residents could be a great theme to work on and, with Millie's help, infiltrates the building to get to know them better.
It's a pleasant reading, although certain themes were far from it. Trigger warning for depression, suicide, death of pets. But even despite that, it's a page turner. That said, even while I avidly advanced, I wasn't really sure of the point of the story. Maybe because this is not my usual genre of book, I'm not as prepared to see it, but I would many times wonder where the author wanted to go with it. Then, I was a little frustrated that suddenly it focused a lot on romance. This isn't a romance book, it's not about the thrills or the cheering for a couple or the swooning. From the start, the romance is pretty messy, actually. It's made to be messy, and it is messy. But it made me wonder if that's where Reid wanted to get, debate that one romance. I guess it's valid, there is a lot of questions to be made about it. But even for that, I'd say the book failed as we reach the end and that was it. So I'll be honest, I either didn't understand the point or I just didn't like how it was developed.
Kennedy's story is probably the one that had the best arc but I fail to see why it's even there to be honest. Nevertheless, it was the one that made me more curious about how it would end up.
I have trouble classifying the ending. It was overall okay. At the same time, it made me think of the expectations for what the story would explore and see that it never really got there. It might be kind of silly, but as an example, the house Millie wanted to buy, did I miss anything there? Was it from another book? To the last page it made me think it had more to it. I didn't want to read other reviews to get more information so not to be influenced, so it could be that. Also, some aspects of the consequences felt at the same time underwhelming and exaggerated. They made us fear for most of the book that something super bad would happen and when something kind of bad does happen to them, it didn't seem fair. So there is how I was lightly disappointed. Reid did so well with closing her previous book, but this one, I can't describe it that way.
In any case, what comes to me is that this is a great book to read, so I will recommend it around, but it's not that solid a plot to think about.
Honest review based on an ARC provided by Netgalley. Many thanks to the publisher for this opportunity.
Rating: 4 out of 5.
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