Emira’s hold-up at the store is grim, but the narrative is more interested in the prickly insidious damage done every day by the likes of Alix, who’s fascinated by Emira’s music taste (Childish Gambino gets a shout-out) but uninterested in her birthday or who she might live with, and Kelley, who’s happy to drop the N-word in an anecdote on a first date and take Emira to a John Wayne-themed bar. What works here: Such a Fun Age is certainly fighting the good fight – it’s taking a significant and necessary bash at the sorts of racisms that often slip under the public radar by tackling the ‘well-meaning’ white folk. Throughout the rest of the book, the two embark on a Who’s The Least Racist tug-of-war, with Emira both the prize and the reluctant adjudicator. Kelley accuses Alix of playing the plantation master with her black employees Alix accuses Kelley of fetishizing the black people in his life – most of his friends and every single one of this girlfriends, since Alix herself. Emira is, of course, caught in the middle. When this big fat coincidence is finally revealed – over a painful Thanksgiving dinner at Alix’s house – it reignites long-standing and not-very-well-buried tensions between Alix and Kelley. Here’s the spoiler: Kelley turns out to be Alix’s ex, the teenage boyfriend who ruined high-school for her. Of course, about halfway through the book, these strands meet with a cacophonous and predictable crash.

The first half of the book, then, runs two parallel narratives: Alix’s back-story (she’s a motivational speaker for ambitious young women and a kind of proto-influencer – this is set in 2016 – and has recently moved to Philadelphia from New York), her panic about her life as a young parent, her desperation for Elmira to like her and Emira’s social life, her bond with Alix’s young daughter, her panic nonetheless about her lack of a discernible career, and her burgeoning relationship with Kelley.

She’s quickly let go, but the event has two major outcomes (aside from Emira’s public humiliation, natch): one, Alix, dripping with white ladies’ tears, determines to befriend Emira at all costs two, Emira meets and hooks up with Kelley, an older, woker-than-woke white guy who filmed the whole nasty incident and later asks her out. One night, while hanging out with her three-year old charge, Emira’s held up by security at a white-hipster supermarket and accused of kidnapping. Emira (black, mid-twenties, broke and adrift) – is a part-time babysitter for Alix (white, early thirties, affluent and ambitious). Apologies up front: there’s no way to effectively review this without at least one spoiler, so come back later if that’s not your bag.

Kiley reid such a fun age review