Such a Fun Age

This book starts with an incident in which Emira, a young black woman, is accused of having stolen the white toddler she babysits, Briar, in a grocery-store confrontation. The tone is set immediately to examine inherent racial biases, but less so these explicit moments of racism, and more how even “good white people” exploit black women in subtle, but nefarious ways.

The story follows Emira, a young black woman who, as with many twenty-somethings, is in a bit of a crisis regarding what to do with her life. She falls into a babysitting gig because it pays well, and ends up falling in love with the toddler she cares for, Briar, ostensibly appreciating not only the uncomplicated nature of children, but also a certain flavor of neglect that Briar feels as her upper-class mother is too worried about exteriors to be the best mother she can be. It's not hard to extrapolate out that neglect to upper-class white women generally (cough, myself included, which lent to some uncomfortable moments of introspection): the book asks us to question: how many of our “good intentions” are ultimately self-serving?

At the same time, Emira is developing a relationship with a white man, who fetishizes black bodies and black culture, exclusively dating black women: favorably, this can be interpreted as coincidence, or narrow attraction; less favorably, as black women as commodities (admittedly, a harsh interpretation, and one I would not go quite so far as to take – but gets you thinking).

All in all, I think the book plays on this idea of white people centering themselves in any American narrative as protagonists, including those, like Emira's, that are explicitly not theirs.

This is a great summer/pandemic read. It moves along like a light beach novel, but it handles serious issues with sensitivity.

Emira is a young Black woman, a recent college graduate who hasn't yet found a career path she wants to follow. She takes a part time babysitting job for Alix, a white “influencer” who has a 3 year old daughter, Briar, and an infant, Catherine. Emira connects deeply with Briar, and comes to love taking care of her. In a late night incident in an upscale grocery store, Emira is accused by a security guard and another customer of kidnapping Briar. Kelley, a white male bystander, captures the incident on his cell phone. He and Emira begin seeing each other, unaware that Emira's boss, Alix, also has a history with Kelley. When that history comes to light, the “fun” begins.

I loved how this novel portrayed issues of autonomy and becoming an authentic person in the characters as they dealt with their situations. Power dynamics in employer/employee relations were also a theme, as well as authenticity between Black and white people. Emira emerges as a very likeable, capable young woman with a reliable inner compass and you'll find yourself rooting for her to find her way through the confusion that surrounds her.

One summer night, Emira Tucker is confronted by security at a supermarket and is accused of kidnapping the two-year-old girl she is babysitting.

I think this book falls under the saying, “don't judge a book by its cover.” The bright colors and fun title masks the heavy undertones within the pages of this book. It tackles race and privilege in depths I didn't think Reid was going to take. I was intrigued as to how the story was going to play out and couldn't put it down. I was a little disappointed with how certain situations played out, because I was expecting a little more from it, but I thoroughly enjoyed following the lives of Alix and Emira!

Briar's relationship with Emira is one of the things I loved about this book. Reid captures the struggles and the joy of babysitting or being a nanny that are oftentimes under-appreciated. Another thing I loved is the multiple points of view and the different issues the characters go through that one can see or experience in real life.

If you're looking for a book with realistic situations, fun dialogue, relatable moments, and crazy bosses, I would definitely recommend this read.

3.5/5 stars. I'm unsure whether to round up or down.

There's things I absolutely loved about this book, like the discussions it created on race and privilege, it didn't go in the direction I expected. The first half of this book felt like it had no direction but it came together in the second half. IDK what to rate it.

Extremely readable, even In These Times where I'm finding focusing on a book more difficult than before. Loved Emira and her friends and all the various tensions between them, loved the alternating POVs between Emira and Alix. I find it fascinating that this is a Reese Witherspoon book club pick when Alix is essentially a character Reese Witherspoon has played a couple of times before, just taller and a little younger than current-day Reese. There's so many currents and tensions playing themselves out in this - race, class (oh my god, I really want to read an essay about class in this novel), gender, age - it's incredible. Also, Kelley is such good satire of that exact type of dude. His last text to Emira made me both cackle because it was so perfect and want to throw my phone because of course. Perfect.

Rating is probably more like a 3.5, but rounding up. Reasons for the deduction: I feel like the book didn't quite stick the landing with the big live TV interview and I found the reveal at the very end (the flashback to Alix in high school and the locker cleanout) kind of pointless? Also, at one point, the narrative seems to suggest that Alix is overweight/out of shape at 5'10", 141 pounds (yeah, it uses exact numbers), and like. That's borderline underweight, and I know Alix is insecure about absolutely everything but maybe let's not endorse that viewpoint. There's also a scene earlier than that about how her friends tell her she's overweight, but if these are the numbers, again this isn't a great thing to throw in there.

I was so confused by this book. All of the characters are complete caricatures to the point where I thought the author was trying to make a statement about stereotyping. And then I realized that the joke was on me - she's being totally serious in her representations. Oh. My. Gosh. There are so many infuriatingly unbelievable parts of this book that I don't even want to relive them long enough in my head to write them down here.

Two huge things irked me to no end: The “relationship” between Kelley and Emira was laughable. She's immature with nothing to offer an almost middle-aged man, so where's the draw? How am I to believe this is a real relationship? It was so unbelievable that I was sure that he had been stalking Alex/Alix and trying to involve himself in her life by dating her sitter. How disappointing to know the author was actually trying to portray a legitimate relationship. Yikes!

The scenes with both sets of friends made me want to cringe. None of the friends had any depth and they were all cookie-cutter stereotypes. And the slang used within Emira's group was so overdone. We get it, they're young Black women, but the author seems to insinuate that their ethnicities cancel out the fact that they're also college-educated professionals.

Ugh, I'm getting angry all over again about these stupid characters. Save yourself the trouble and skip this book.

This is a face paced, thought provoking read. However it wasn't exactly what I was expecting. I picked it up after listening to an interview with the author, and the description of the opening chapters really grabbed me. With the perspectives jumping back and forth from Emira, and her employer Alix, I was hoping for a story about race, growing up, female friendship and motherhood. However, with the introduction of Emira's boyfriend as the antagonist, it really started to lose me. Alix goes from being a kind of quirky, somewhat self obsessed mom, to suddenly being the full on villain of the story. I would have bought that more if the story had been told solely from Emira's POV, but since you're in so much of Alix's head from the beginning it felt like a weird twist.

I was also surprised to learn that the author lives in Philadelphia, because I felt like she was kind of negative towards the city. Alix treats moving from NYC to Philadelphia as if she's moving to a farm in Kansas, and I never really understood why. The train ride between the cities is like an hour and a half. Philadelphia is a big, vibrant, historic city with a lot of cool neighborhoods, with the bonus of being much more affordable than Manhattan. Given a choice, I choose to visit and live in Philly. I was so confused about why Alix was hiding the fact that she moved to basically an equivalent, if not better, city.

There were also some weird elements that I thought were confusing choices on the authors part. She uses Emira's sibling's success to illustrate Emira's own dissatisfaction with not being able to find her own passion in life, but the example she uses is that her brother wins a barista competition and lands a job at a fancy coffee shop in Texas? This was so unusual and specific that I was wondering if this actually happened to someone the author knows? And the locker / letter reveal at the end was a real stretch, it would have been better to leave it ambiguous for the readers. I can't think of any reason why Alex would have been cleaning out everyone's lockers at the end of the school year - the author's reasoning that it was traditionally the job of the student council just felt like nonsense.

Overall it's not a bad read, I can see why it's getting a lot of buzz this year. The ending was underwhelming, the jump forward in time added little to the story.

3.5 stars. Enter the first major discussion point novel for 2020. No doubt it will be loved (or hated) by book clubs everywhere. It examines race, class, well intentioned interference (or was it?) and an array of really really unlikable characters.

Erima works as a babysitter for a privileged family (Alix - uurggghh, even her name is pretentious) when one night she is accused of kidnapping her small, adorable charge - Briar, simply because it is late, she is wearing party clothes and she is black. So begins a deluge of people interfering in Emira's life and telling her what to do.

It was an uncomfortable and complicated read - but sometimes we need to leave our comfort zone to be part of the conversation.

This story was nothing like I thought it would be based on the synopsis. I thought the whole point of the book was to see how the main character handles an unsavory video being published online about her. You know, like really take a look at the effects of social media on someone's life and how quickly it can ruin someone. As well as how race adds another layer to the situation, and how someone can bounce back from it. (something similar to this does happen but not until the last 10% of the book). However, this was not that at all. It was still good for what it was and got into some other interesting topics, just not what it lead on to be.

This is the story of Emira and Alix. Emira is a 25-year-old black woman figuring out the path she wants to pursue in life. Alix is a white woman in her early thirties, well-to-do, mother of two, and adrift in her own way. Emira babysits Alix's daughters, and is particularly smitten with the older the the two, a toddler named Briar.

Alix, at first glance is a kind, somewhat progressive woman, but she has brings her issues to her relationship with Emira. Alix takes pride in having multiple PoC at the dinner table, because of what it says about her. She becomes obsessed with and dotes on Emira for much the same reason. She is kinda like a lot of white liberal women, and this story explores how insidious this all is, and how people pass these behaviors down to their children even without being aware of it – because these women also write their own narratives and buy into their own manufactured version.

I find it interesting, and valid, how Emira was not a “go-getter,” taking life in stride and avoiding confrontations. I think it's a less explored POV. She doesn't know what she wants to do, but she knows that no one else should decide for her either.

Because Emira is so low key, events that in another novel would be bigger explosions tend to operate more subtly. She sees and does what she needs to see and do in her own time, and at her own pace.

I appreciated very much the last scene that makes clear a dynamic that was hiding in plain site in terms of Emira, Briar, and Alix. Alix, for all her pretense of enlightenment, is not that far from a plantation owner's wife, absolving guilt and responsibility by treating “the help” very well, and wondering why she isn't better appreciated.

Didn't enjoy the romance-ish part, or the way that all the woman characters seemed to compulsively drool over one other character. I also think it took too long to get going, but I made it through the audiobook without quitting, so it wasn't too bad in that respect. One other thing I disliked was the constant interruption of kid-dialogue.

The books is centered on differences between intention and reality(especially things no one can control, like happenstance), and includes a ton of remarks on subtle interactions and vocalizes a lot of thoughts that people would never actually admit to, usually. That's a large part of why it was entertaining enough to read(listen to) for me.

Kind of feels like a ‘book club book' if that makes sense. Lots of things to talk about with people that might spur discussion or sharing of similar stories, but beyond subtle racism and class, it also feels like the rest of it just isn't that deep. The rest of the main character's life feels like it didn't really matter at all, and I suspect the toddler may very well have been thrown in as a plot device that could add to the novel's word count.

There's a powerful moment in [b:Rising Strong 23317538 Rising Strong Brené Brown https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1428641002l/23317538.SX50.jpg 42872911] where Brené Brown relates a friend asking her, “I do, however, think that in general people are doing the best they can. What do you think?” and the explosive soul-searching that ensued. [b:Marcus Aurelius 30659 Meditations Marcus Aurelius https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1421618636l/30659.SY75.jpg 31010] phrased it a little differently a few centuries before that: ”They are like this because they can't tell good from evil.” However you think about it, this is a subject I've struggled with since long before I ever read either. I'm starting with this because I found it a useful background to reading Such a Fun Age.First things first, though: stick with it, it gets better. The first many chapters are kind of tedious: (primarily) shallow entitled self-absorbed characters and their backstories, thankfully salvaged by the presence of Briar, a three-year-old with more curiosity, self-awareness, empathy and communication ability than any other three characters put together. I also found myself gravitating toward the aforementioned question, do people do the best they can? How do people become moral actors? Most importantly, how do affluent attractive people do so? Can they? (Spoiler: yes. I consider myself fortunate to have many such as friends). How do some people overcome the disability of privilege?But that's just the first quarter, before the train wreck. After that, shit got real interesting real fast, and zigged and zagged into many directions, none of which I was expecting, and all of which show an impressive maturity on the part of young Ms. Reid. This was a thought-provoking book, fueling my lifelong interest in the above questions, and, as I would expect (demand) from a good book, answering none; leaving me to keep wondering and, I hope, to be able to converse about it with friends one day.

it is hard to articulate my exact thoughts and feelings about this book because its very difficult to talk about a book i have loved. i think the author did an outstanding job with depicting how white people think they are helping but are simply being selfish. when the author showed moments like the supermarket scene and how a white guy was encouraging that she post it online, or how the white employer was wondering how to approach her sitter. i couldn't figure out who was worst between alix and kelley, but as it turns out it is both of them.

my utmost favorite character was of course briar and i loved the parts she was in and her relationship with emira <3