Waiting “for her hands to find themselves,” she left her small Maryland town for Philadelphia, where she became the first person in her family to attend a four-year college. She comes from a family of makers-bookbinders, latte artists, seamstresses, beekeepers-whose proclivity for craftsmanship is “so dogged that it leaned into religious territory.” Her parents and siblings had fallen easily into their chosen fields, but Emira struggled to discover a passion of her own. But any good comedy is about subverting expectations, and this ominous, all-too-familiar instance of racial profiling gives way to a funny, fast-paced social satire about privilege in America, and about, as Reid said in a recent book talk, the “everyday domestic biases that we don’t even know we have.”Īt the heart of the novel is Emira Tucker, the babysitter, who is an aimless 25-year-old former English major with a far-from-conventional background. A heated exchange with the market’s security guard ensues-all recorded on video-and the woman is allowed to leave only after the child’s father arrives to explain the situation. As the book begins, there’s certainly not much to laugh about: A young black woman in an upscale grocery store in Philadelphia is accused of kidnapping the white toddler she’s babysitting.

“A comedy of good intentions” might seem an improbable description of a book that lays bare issues of race and class in contemporary America-but that’s how Kiley Reid aptly sums up her debut novel, Such a Fun Age.

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