Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Kiley Reid, author of her debut novel Such A Fun Age, just published by Putnam.

Kiley graduated from the Iowa Writers Workshop as have so many wonderful writers and where she had wonderful teachers like Paul Harding and Jess Walters. And I have been really happy to have interviewed both of them. (Tinkers, Beautiful Ruins) Such a Fun Age is her first novel.

This book is an uneasy one. It makes us think really hard about the way things are and maybe the way things are going. It also reminds us quite starkly of the way things were.

For me, an old white guy, it made me question my personality, my own truth and the way I think and the way I act.

It’s much easier for a black person to experience this book, because what our characters encounter is what black readers encounter every day.

That’s what makes this book so well written. The fact that it provides a perspective that we don’t often have a chance to experience. Like looking in a mirror and seeing who you really are. Generally there is who you think you are, who others think you are and who you are. But you don’t often get the chance to perceive yourself objectively.

And this couldn’t have happened in this book unless Kiley was able, as she is, to capture the feelings that toddlers have, that young black women have and that affluent white people have on a daily basis, in their own dialects. Not easy.

I loved it. But it made me nervous.