What price are you willing to pay? Kiley Reid’s Come and Get It explores ambition, class, and compromise on a college campus

What starts as a college novel about an overworked RA quickly builds into something darker, messier, and far more interesting. In Come and Get It, Kiley Reid (Such a Fun Age) pulls readers into the fluorescent-lit hallways of a University of Arkansas dorm where ambition, identity, and power quietly grind against one another until the friction threatens to ignite.

The book centers on Millie Cousins, a 24-year-old “super senior” RA with big goals and a razor-sharp budget spreadsheet. She dreams of homeownership, financial stability, and a long-term campus job—ideally in housing, a world she knows inside and out. Millie genuinely enjoys dorm life, even the rituals of roommate drama and bulletin boards. But despite her clear-eyed focus, she’s mired in the emotional labor of Belgrade Dormitory, where she splits duties with another RA and is expected to monitor the mental health and behavior of dozens of residents—all for just $250 a month.

Enter Agatha Paul, a visiting professor and journalist on the hunt for her next compelling story. She’s drawn to Millie not just as a character study but as a foil to her own financial chaos. While Agatha’s personal life—including her crumbling marriage—is unraveling due to money mismanagement, Millie represents a kind of quiet financial competence she both envies and wants to exploit.

Reid is especially skilled at capturing the blurred lines in relationships where power is unevenly distributed: professor and student, employer and employee, RA and resident, adult and young adult. The characters don’t always behave badly—but the rules are so unclear, and the consequences so high, that eventually someone must pay.

What’s most unsettling isn’t the scandal or the fallout (though both are there), but how easily things slide from awkward to unethical. Millie and Agatha each make choices that don’t seem damning in the moment—until they are. Reid’s talent lies in making us empathize with these choices even as we flinch from their implications.

At its heart, Come and Get It is a novel about class. Millie’s financial discipline is both her superpower and her burden; she’s hyperaware of what things cost, what things are worth, and what she can afford to lose. For Agatha, money is a more abstract—and more destructive—force. It’s the wedge in her marriage, the flaw in her professional ethics, and the root of her fascination with Millie.

Have you read Come and Get It? What did you think of Millie’s choices—or Agatha’s? Let’s talk in the comments.

Related Content

• Author Kiley Reid on money and day jobs and creative work (The Creative Independent)
• Such A Fun Age – Kiley Reid (The Black Book Blog)
• Must Read Monday: 10.28.24 (The Diversity Fellow’s Blog)
• Kiley Reid’s “Come and Get It” is like a Burn Book (Southern Review of Books)

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Now that Jack has been forced to reflect on everything he has to lose, he resolves to do better. He’s determined to spend more time at home with his family and repair the relationships that have suffered over the years while he’s been so focused on work. But as Callie’s behavior becomes increasingly bizarre, Jack realizes he has a lot more room to improve than he realized – and it might be too late to save his daughter after all.

For fans of We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Push, and Baby Teeth.