Have you been reading much? Or have my book posts been annoying because you’re not in the mood lately? Whatever the case, before you go any further, request this title from your library.

Such A Fun Age was so excellent that I read it in a day, a feat that probably last occurred in 6th grade. It’s not that it was super short or light reading, it was just so good I couldn’t put it down.

With life limited by COVID, sometimes it feels like I don’t even know how to behave in public anymore. Am I reading social cues properly? Am I ending conversations before they get awkward? Am I saying ridiculous things or oversharing because it’s been too long since I had adult human contact?

I’m never totally sure.

I think this increased anxiety from feeling rusty in social situations made Such A Fun Age, by Kiley Reid, especially wonderful.

Reid introduces us to characters from several demographics: A young woman of color, a child, a middle aged white woman. And she gives us the assurance that she fully understands each of those ways of beings, the way they might think, cope, and speak.

Conversations in Such A Fun Age feel like dialogue that would happen in real life. Some books have awkward conversations where information is being communicated verbally for the sole purpose of explaining something to the reader. Here the information transfer feels natural and unforced.

Reid’s book invites us to think about our motivations in social interactions and to how we think about our own and others’ experience of race, packaged in a story easily draws you in and holds your attention till you arrive at the last page, hunched in bed near a dim light in the wee hours of the night.