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Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid – charming, authentic, entertaining

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/07/such-a-fun-age-by-kiley-reid-review

Money, class and race are incisively observed in a razor-sharp debut

At the start of Kiley Reid’s standout first novel, a security guard accosts a young black babysitter as she strolls the aisles of an upscale Philadelphia supermarket with her pint-size white charge. It’s late, the babysitter having been summoned from a party so the child’s affluent parents can deal with a domestic emergency, and a meddlesome fellow shopper has decided that something about the pair doesn’t “feel right”. A tense standoff ensues, the guard refusing to let the babysitter leave and all but accusing her of kidnapping while a bystander films it on his phone. Eventually, the babysitter has to summon the child’s father to collect them.

It’s a flawlessly paced scene, at once funny and menacing, its every rippling nuance captured with precision and acuity. It’s also a far more straightforward example of racism in action than anything that follows, because the focus of this book is an altogether more slippery and underexamined type of prejudice: liberal racism.

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