Come and Get It Review
"If you go slow the flames get bigger. If you go fast you don’t really see them.”
Happy long weekend!
I’m procrastinating cleaning the house, the cat won’t stop meowing, and we’re turning the page on our July book, Come and Get It by Kiley Reid 🐖
One Sentence Summary:
A group of college (and college-adjacent) women with a lot of personal shit going on make each other’s lives worse.
My Thoughts
With a summary like that, y’all already know I liked this book.
Come and Get It has a few of my fave ingredients: messy female characters, punchy writing, and uncomfortable scenarios.
It also has terrible Goodreads ratings. The people hate it, and I’m not sure why?
Let’s come and get (into) it!
I combed through the negative reviews so you don’t have to! Here are the three most common reasons readers hated this book:
There are too many characters
There’s no plot
The story didn’t have a point
I’m willing to overlook this list for the line-level writing (more on that below), but I also disagree!
Humour me as we go item by item…
Characters
There is, admittedly, a huge cast.
We have a financially struggling RA, a lonely student running away from a scandal, a sugar-mama professor navigating a breakup, a quiet girl who just wants a clean kitchen, and a group of sorority sisters orbiting a tomboy obsessed with getting a dog…
That would be a lot to juggle if Come and Get It was anything less than a masterclass in character study.
I cannot stress enough that Every👏 Single 👏 Person 👏 Felt 👏 Real👏
They were all interesting.
They were all flawed.
They were all inconsistent.
And, most importantly, they were specific.
Take, for example, this very relatable, very sweet, very sad moment of a college girl making her first friend at a new school:
“Kennedy walked back to her dorm a different person; a regular college person capable of making friends. She imagined Shea pulling her aside. This is boring, Shea would say. Do you want to grab a drink? Kennedy would say yeah, that she was thinking the same thing. She imagined saying other things, too. Not at the barbecue, but later on. Not to be weird, Kennedy would say, but I was kind of depressed before I met you. She would tell her that she would never have known….” (pg 144)
Who among us hasn’t fantasized about something equally as mundane? As bleak? This is so on-the-nose that it might as well be a Biore strip!
If that doesn’t do it for you, try these devastating mid-breakup thoughts:
“There were many things she wanted to say, many of which had no beginning or end. How am I supposed to. Because this feels bad. A complete nightmare. The way I feel for you. But I speak differently now. I don’t go up at the ends. I bought a vest, she thought, humiliated. It was so expensive but I did it just because of yours...(pg 274)
This is exactly what ending a relationship is like!
Your brain goes to crazy places. You think in fragments. I remember an ex telling me mid-break up, “But your friends. I like them better than mine.”
Should he have kept that to himself? YES!
But he didn’t because breakups are hard and strange and weird and these are the tiny, defining character moments that this book is all about.
As a bonus, Kiley Reid listed where she got the inspiration for each character in the acknowledgments. They came to her from other books, during research, based on interviews etc... I thought that was such a cool detail and a reminder to — say it with me now — ALWAYS READ THE AUTHOR’S NOTE.
Plot:
Though character-driven, Come and Get It culminated in an extremely tense and entangled climax.
It had the same payoff feeling as the “Darkest Timeline” in the “Remedial Chaos Theory” episode of Community.
I know. That’s a super deep cut.
For a perfect disaster scene like this to work, you need a ton of context to set the stage. Every seemingly benign conversation, backstory, and detail had a role in getting us to the moment when shit hit the fan.
What kept me reading - and therefore collecting said context - was the characters.
I found them and the writing compelling enough to trust that everything would come together eventually.
And you know what? It did.
BUT! Even if it didn’t!
I would have read to the end just to spend more time in each of their messy messy minds.
For me, that would have been enough.
On the point:
This critique is a bit harder for me to refute.
Is there a major dramatic question answered by the end of the story? I’m not sure.
There were a bunch of themes - race, class, gender, power, sexuality - but not one precise topic I can confidently say this book was about.
A couple of quotes come to mind, like this meta moment about enjoying watching people misbehave: “She liked sitting there. Even when they were at their worst, she liked letting their vernacular wash over her.” (pg 22)
Or this one about fire juggling, which seems pretty apt: “If you go slow the flames get bigger. If you go fast you don’t really see them.” (pg 193)
Ultimately, I re-read the first and last chapters looking for a thread to tie it all together. The strongest moment was this marker of growth from a character who we met in an RA uniform:
“She’d done her hair and she wore a zip-up fleece and jeans. Over the weekend she’d decided to never again receive bad news in shorts” (pg 284)
Come and Get It is a series of coming-of-age stories born from mistakes.
There are several instances where the characters reflect on the type of women they want to be (ie: I shouldn’t have used money to solve relationship issues, I should have stuck to my values, I should have worn pants etc.).
If I had to define the point of the book, I would say it’s about how every tiny decision compounds to create our understanding of self.
…At least that’s the best I can come up with right now. Idk? Can you think of something better??
Rating:
I’m giving Come and Get It 4 stars.
Like our June book pick, Worry, this book is anxiety-inducing and charged in all the right ways.
It’s character-driven, unique, and chock-full of interesting commentary on money, power dynamics, and coming-of-age moments.
If you love observing flawed people (ie: reality TV) this might be the book for you!
If you need a clear and pacy plot, go look somewhere else.
“There was nothing left to do but the best and worst thing she could” (pg 272), which, in this case, is to pick a completely new book.
Our Next Chapter:
🏟 The Snap, Elizabeth Staple.
Did someone say “more mess”???? I gotchu.
“Dangerous secrets. A toxic workplace. And an unsolved murder. . . . A football professional reckons with the choices that made her career in the boys’ club world of sports possible in this riveting and sharp Friday Night Lights meets I Know What You Did Last Summer debut”
This book was gifted to me by the author, and I can’t wait to give it a read and honest review! You can read along with My Side Plot on Fable and Instagram
Also On My Shelf
A couple of non-book recs for you
Hollywood’s Next Marvel Moment Is Romantasy, Bloomberg
Content adored by women and ignored by men is - quite literally - what I spend all day thinking about. This is women’s sports. This is dresses with pockets. This is ‘little-treat’ culture. This is the hill I will die on:
“Romantasy offers producers something they haven’t had since the Twilight and True Blood craze of the aughts: A treasure trove of largely untouched, screen-ready IP beloved by women, queer individuals and others who are too often left out of the entertainment equation. There’s just one catch: Men in the C-suite will need to share or cede creative control for that huge and underserved audience to see any of it. The data alone ought to convince them to do just that.”
100 Swims: Last Summer’s Diaries, Hurley Winkler
I love Hurley’s newsletter and have been participating in her Summer Writing Nights. 100 Swims is a magazine compilation of excerpts from her diary as she attempted to complete 100 swims and finish her book last summer.
Epilogue:
What do you think the point is?
Did you have a favourite character?
Did you love it or hate it?