This is a strange book. Maybe, it started off as a film script or maybe it started off as several film scripts? Whatever the origins, it's an odd read.
The central character is Millie Cousins who, in order to support her graduation, takes a job as a Residential Assistant in a girls dormitory at a university in Arkansas. She doesn't seem well-equipped for the post and often seems to be just getting by without any proper training or understanding of the role.
Among the girls she has responsibility for are Peyton, Kennedy and Tyler who are sassy, smart and nasty in varying degrees. Then there is Agatha, a much older visiting professor who appears to be ripping off the life stories of the nasty girls in her spare time to support her own research.
Agatha has a long back story (like most of the other characters) described in painstaking detail. Kiley Reid adds detail and back stories about all of the characters - including what people have in their rooms, what they eat and how they dress but, at times, it seems like a diversion from the plot.
Anyway, Agatha and Millie are clearly going to have a relationship and it is clearly going to end in disaster and, yes, there is a train wreck at the end but in some ways it's hard to care what happens.
The style of the book, perhaps a strength for some readers, involves a lot of trivial conversation - either bitchy interchanges or people talking without saying that they really mean. And, if you can connect with that and the low-level fraternity house environment, enjoy the adolescent incidents in the dorm, empathise with Millie and stop thinking how unprofessional Agatha is, then you might enjoy it.
(Come and Get It is published by Bloomsbury. Thanks to the publishers and to NetGalley for an advance copy.)
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