Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid

 

“Emira found herself arranging her mouth as if she’d ingested something too hot. She caught a morphed reflection in a freezer door, and she saw herself in her entirety.”

So I'd been hearing a lot about this book and wondered what the fuss was all about. For a first novel it is amazingly good. Equal parts hilarious, uncomfortable and troubling it is undoubtedly an amazing piece of writing that I throughly recommend ( as have a host of reviewers out there).

Reviewing a novel about race is challenging these days. I don't want to offend anyone, I can only relate my feelings about reading this book. As a white reader I experienced the creepy sensation of the do-gooder boss who sees Emira as a project and reflection of her liberal attitudes. In Alix's gaze, Emira ceases to be a person and is a walking beacon of virtue signalling by a cardboard self-help guru whose facade is purely plastic. The ***spoilers ahead*** revelations of Alix's past and relationship with Kelley further illustrate her fake nature.

Kelley isn't as colour blind as he repeatedly insists he is. In some ways, he's the embodiment of the sexual fetishisation of people of colour, with his penchant for dark skinned girlfriends coming as a disappointing revelation. I so wanted him to be the perfect boyfriend, but then I remembered they rarely exist, even in literature.

If I've made you think this is all serious and depressing, then fear not. One of the greatest achievements of the novel is that the heroine, Emira, is such a well rounded, engaging character and so entertaining as we, the reader, share her knowing winks, disappointments and eventual triumphant escape from the babysitting rut.

Personally, I think we're all humans and there are aspects within us all  that make us feel like the 'other'. Some of us pass through the world with less of these complications, that doesn't impede our ability to empathise with others subject to more obvious biases. What this story so brilliantly does is bring those to the fore, so that we can think about what needs to change in today's world, how complicit we are in that structure ,what should have changed many centuries before and the comforting lies we sometimes tell ourselves.

5 out of 5 - believe the hype.