August 1, 2023
In 2017, Agatha, a commanding 38-year-old white woman with several books to her credit, arrives at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, to study attitudes toward weddings, then switches her focus to campus culture. She's helped by 24-year-old Black resident assistant Millie, with whom she becomes dangerously involved. A study of power, responsibility, and the bad choices we sometimes make; following the multi-best-booked Such a Fun Age. Prepub Alert.
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Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
September 1, 2023
In her second novel, after her multi-best-booked Such a Fun Age, Reid offers an illuminating study of power, responsibility, and the bad choices we sometimes make, written in the fresh, bright language for which she's known. In 2017, Agatha, a commanding, emotionally careless 38-year-old white woman with several major books to her credit, arrives at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, to serve as a visiting professor while researching social attitudes toward weddings. Upon meeting several women students, she changes her focus to campus culture, with her research helped along by 24-year-old Black resident assistant Millie, who is painstakingly saving to buy her own house. Millie is crushing on resident director Josh but is also deeply attracted to Agatha, who is no more scrupulous regarding Millie than she is in her journalistic endeavors; she eavesdrops on students and then publishes lightly disguised, if heavily trafficked pieces in Teen Vogue. Millie and Agatha's affair will have consequences, and not just for them, yet what's most remarkable here is the grace and understanding the author shows her characters. That includes Kennedy, a student overcoming depression after making a terrible mistake, who has her own reasons for wanting to take a class with Agatha. VERDICT An emotionally intense exploration of power dynamics within relationships that doesn't settle for easy villains and victims.--Barbara Hoffert
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October 15, 2023
Reid's highly anticipated follow-up to her best-selling debut, Such a Fun Age (2019), is set in Fayetteville at the University of Arkansas campus, where professor and author Agatha Paul has arrived to teach a nonfiction writing class and do research for her next book. Agatha enlists the help of Millie, a 24-four-year-old RA who has returned to school for her senior year after taking time off to care for her mother. At first, Agatha's research is centered on the way college women view marriage, but she soon finds their relationship to money more interesting and begins publishing doctored interviews with the students in Teen Vogue. Millie offers up her dorm room so Agatha can listen in on the students' conversations, finding herself increasingly attracted to Agatha, who is both white and gay, even as she's also nursing a crush on the resident director Josh, who is one of the only other Black students in the dorm. A deft exploration of how microaggressions can lead to macro consequences, Reid's second outing will appeal to readers who enjoy slow-burn, character-driven novels.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Reid has a ready and eager audience for her second novel, and the word is out.
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Starred review from October 23, 2023
Reid returns after her smash hit Such a Fun Age with a sardonic and no-holds-barred comedy of manners. When Agatha Paul, a white writer in her late 30s, arrives at the University of Arkansas as a visiting professor in 2017, she is separated from her wife, a Black dancer in Chicago, and intends to write a book about contemporary weddings. She switches topics, however, after interviewing a group of entitled young women who live in a dorm for scholarship students (one, named Jenna, who cashes in on a scholarship for Mexican Americans because her grandmother is Mexican, jokingly calls herself a “cute little refugee” and considers her work study salary “fun money”). The dorm’s Black resident assistant Millie Cousins, who resents the others’ shamelessness, agrees to let Agatha eavesdrop on them through a wall in exchange for $20 per session. There’s also sensitive scholarship student Kennedy, who is so grotesquely spoiled by her mother that she must move into a single room to accommodate all her stuff. Overlaying the narrative of Agatha’s clandestine project are backstories of the principal characters, which gradually reveal sources of their ongoing pain and push the story to an explosive climax. Reid is a keen observer—every page sparkles with sharp analysis of her characters. This blistering send-up of academia is interlaced with piercing moral clarity. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME.
November 15, 2023
A very thin wall in a college dorm causes complications for eavesdroppers on both sides. Reid follows her debut, Such a Fun Age (2020), with another sharp, edgy social novel, this time set at the University of Arkansas. Primary among the large cast are Agatha, a 38-year-old gay white visiting professor; Millie, a Black 24-year-old RA; and the five undergrads who live in the suite next door to her. The students include a threesome of white friends--Agatha categorizes them as "Jenna: tall. Casey: southern. Tyler: mean" when she interviews them for a book she's working on--and two loners: Peyton (who is Black) and the white Kennedy, who's been through a terrible experience just before arriving at college. Kennedy can hear everything the RAs say when they meet up in Millie's room, and she has so little going on in her own life that she listens in quite a bit. Meanwhile, everything that's said in the suites is heard loud and clear in Millie's room. So when Agatha becomes fascinated with the girls after that initial interview, particularly with the way they talk and their relationships to money, she starts paying Millie (!) to let her come in and eavesdrop on them once a week. As an author, Reid has the very same obsessions she gives her character Agatha, and the guilty pleasure of the book is the way she nails the characters' speech styles, Southern accents, and behavior and her unerring choice of products and other accoutrements to surround them with. "Tyler wasn't actively cruel to Kennedy, but she definitely wasn't all that nice. The small 'hey' she gave when Kennedy opened the door stung with the truce of roommate civility. Perhaps it felt more hostile in comparison to the way she greeted Peyton. She'd go 'Oh hello, roomie, ' or 'Pey-Pey's home.' And then Peyton would say, 'Okaayyy. Hiii.' " Then Agatha decides to start selling these "interviews" to Teen Vogue, and Millie finds she can't stop thinking about Agatha, and mean pranks beget even meaner ones--Ohmahlord, as Casey would say. Reid is a genius of mimicry and social observation.
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