Review: Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid

Such a Fun Age follows Emira, a black babysitter for a white family, and her employer Alix after Emira is stopped in a grocery store and accused of kidnapping Briar, the three-year-old daughter of Alix. The incident is filmed, and, though Emira chooses not to post it, this video has a lot of impact on her life.

There are a lot of things I really loved about this book; first, I found the way the story was written so interesting. Going back and forth between Emira's life and Alix's was really interesting. Alix's story mostly focuses on her disconnection from her life pre-children and how that instability provides the perfect ground for her borderline obsession with her babysitter liking her. She is consumed with Emira in some ways while also being entirely unaware that Emira's life contains problems that are nowhere near Alix's reader (mostly her need for a job that provided health insurance).

I really liked Emira's characterization. I have been a nanny and a babysitter and am a 26-year-old person who is doing the post-college flounder. I have had many parents of children I watch want to both relate to me while not actually fully engaging with the fact that I am in their employ, or only selectively engaging with it. Not everyone (if you are reading this and I babysat for you, it was probably chill), but at times, that dynamic is hard to navigate. It is a really interesting dynamic, and examining it with race being a factor was really interesting and not something that I had to navigate.

I did find the choice to have Alix, a successful and seemingly happily married woman, still hung up on her high school boyfriend very off-putting. I understood the anger or the misplaced resentment, but the level of obsession seemed uncharacteristically childish. Alix is written as calculated and having a laser focus in most other areas of her life, so I found this slightly odd.

I gave this book 4 stars on Goodreads and The StoryGraph. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to read a story with strong characters that deeply explores ideas of intention and impact in white allyship and one black woman's navigation of this issue. I really enjoyed the way we saw Emira figuring out that clearly, Alix thinks she is behaving with virtue. Still, she is unable to actually do the important thing in that equation, which is to listen to Emira.