Come and Get It, novel by Kiley Reid, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, 386 pages, $29
Kiley Reid’s debut novel, Such a Fun Age, was nominated for a Booker Prize and won International Book of the Year. Her sophomore book delves into the irresistible world of an Arkansas college dorm, where Millie, an undergraduate resident assistant, becomes entangled in the chaotic lives of some of the young women on her floor when she begins helping a visiting professor with research on her next book.

Millie, unlike many of her peers, takes her R.A. duties seriously. She decorates and organizes for the arrival of the students at the beginning of the semester, referees disputes between roommates, and enforces safety and wellness protocols. But as Agatha, the visiting professor, seeks more access to the lives of the students she is researching, boundaries are pushed, often punctuated with the exchange of trivial amounts of money, twenty dollars there, fifty dollars here. The sums are not life changing, but their presence alters the actions, token gratuities and honorariums become bribes and exchanges for favors.

Agatha pays Millie to let her eavesdrop on the residents from her own dorm room. An innocent enough arrangement at first, but Millie is complicit in Agatha’s journalistic malpractice, giving her access to the very students she is paid to nurture and protect.

When Agatha publishes a thinly veiled interview with one of Millie’s residents, the piece is a hit. Agatha knows that this is not her best work. It’s lazy journalism and includes invented quotes and details, ostensibly in the service of privacy, but this goes beyond a name change to protect the innocent. She writes more online articles, inventing fictions that cross the line of journalistic ethics.

But ever-responsible Millie is saving up for a house, and the money from Agatha helps. Money is never a driving factor for her transgressions, but it is always in the background. Reacting to the prospect of a house-sitting job, Millie thinks:

“A fifty-four-ounce jar of coconut oil also popped into her mind. Technically, she mused, she could get HBO. She was dying to watch Big Little Lies. And then Millie thought, Ohmygoodness.... With an extra fifty dollars a month, she could get a nice haircut.”

This novel is all characterization. The plot elements in the early part of the story are minimal. It’s difficult to find the thread that will be driving the action later on, but the characters are compelling and intricately wrought. Reid is a masterful observer and social commentator, not only in the characters, but in their fraught relationships and small power struggles, and her writing charms, as in this description of Millie:

“She stood bright-eyed in her red R A polo with the posture of a zookeeper who feeds sea lions for a crowd.”

The result is characters you can’t get enough of and part of the fun is guessing how they are all going to end up affecting each others lives. Quiet humor pervades every scene, but eventually the unremarkable entanglements of these women have life-altering consequences.

Come and Get It is a Southern novel, though one that lacks many of the trappings of the genre. There are no Gothic mansions or pearl clutching ladies. The young women who dominate the pages of this story will become women of a new South. Received social structures of race and class are present, though the markers are often different as in this description of Millie’s dream home:

“On the street corner a tiny yellow house was surrounded by overgrown grass and neglect. The front door was fairy-taled right in the center. Two windows on each side, a smaller one up above. The house looked to have once been painted a canary yellow, but now it was the shade of lemon rind left in a glass. The roof came together in a darling point that Millie had the urge to cup in her hand.”