In a book club and starting to plan your reads for next year? Check out our 2025 picks.

Book Summary and Reviews of Come and Get It by Kiley Reid

Come and Get It by Kiley Reid

Come and Get It

by Kiley Reid

  • Critics' Consensus:
  • Published:
  • Jan 2024, 400 pages
  • Rate this book

  • Buy This Book

About this book

Book Summary

From the celebrated New York Times bestselling author of Such a Fun Age comes a fresh and provocative story about a residential assistant and her messy entanglement with a professor and three unruly students.

It's 2017 at the University of Arkansas. Millie Cousins, a senior resident assistant, wants to graduate, get a job, and buy a house. So when Agatha Paul, a visiting professor and writer, offers Millie an easy yet unusual opportunity, she jumps at the chance. But Millie's starry-eyed hustle becomes jeopardized by odd new friends, vengeful dorm pranks, and illicit intrigue.

A fresh and intimate portrait of desire, consumption, and reckless abandon, Come and Get It is a tension-filled story about money, indiscretion, and bad behavior—and the highly anticipated new novel by acclaimed and award-winning author Kiley Reid.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!
  1. Come and Get It illustrates the intricacies of roommate living. Share your best (read: worst) roommate horror story. In what ways did Kennedy, Peyton, and Tyler's dynamic resonate with an experience you've had? How important is it to the story that author Kiley Reid pens a roommate trio?
  2. Come and Get It is set at a state college in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and none of the main characters are from there. How did the different characters' origins—Millie, Agatha, Kennedy—inform, and perhaps defy, your expectations? Could this story have been set elsewhere? Discuss.
  3. Come and Get It explores desire, entitlement, and consumption within a capitalist society. Discuss how the characters, particularly Kennedy, Agatha...
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

Media Reviews

"Reid returns after her smash hit Such a Fun Age with a sardonic and no-holds-barred comedy of manners…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." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"[A] sharp, edgy social novel... 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... Reid is a genius of mimicry and social observation." —Kirkus Reviews

"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 ... Reid has a ready and eager audience for her second novel, and the word is out." —Booklist

"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... What's most remarkable here is the grace and understanding the author shows her characters... An emotionally intense exploration of power dynamics within relationships that doesn't settle for easy villains and victims." —Library Journal

"Kiley Reid is an expert at teasing apart the messy, complicated, nuanced layers of social dynamics, and has a rare gift for making the unknown feel intimately familiar and the familiar feel brand-new. In Come and Get It, she's crafted a story that moves with the momentum and inevitability of a snowball rolling down a mountain. I couldn't put it down, and I didn't want to either." —Emily Henry, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Happy Place

"Wonderfully immersive, propulsive, and beautifully paced. On page one, there is a story that is already happening, and you're plunged right into the novel's world, already up and running, full of real people, and complicated—that is, substantive—as all hell. Just great." —Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of This Other Eden and Tinkers

This information about Come and Get It was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Author Information

Kiley Reid

Kiley Reid is the author of Such a Fun Age, which was a New York Times bestseller and longlisted for the Booker Prize. Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Playboy, The Guardian, and others. Reid is currently an assistant professor at the University of Michigan.

More Author Information

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

More Recommendations

Readers Also Browsed . . .

more literary fiction...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: The Puzzle Box
    The Puzzle Box
    by Danielle Trussoni
    During the tumultuous last days of the Tokugawa shogunate, a 17-year-old emperor known as Meiji ...
  • Book Jacket
    Something, Not Nothing
    by Sarah Leavitt
    In 2020, after a lifetime of struggling with increasingly ill health, Sarah Leavitt's partner, ...
  • Book Jacket
    A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens
    by Raul Palma
    Raul Palma's debut novel A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens introduces Hugo Contreras, who came to the ...
  • Book Jacket
    The MANIAC
    by Benjamin Labatut
    The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut is an ambitious work that falls squarely into the category of fiction...

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Libby Lost and Found
    by Stephanie Booth

    Libby Lost and Found is a book for people who don't know who they are without the books they love.

Who Said...

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

H I O the G

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.