Such a Fun Age

A young black babysitter, Emira, becomes entangled with two white characters: one is her employer, a "lean-in"-feminist influencer called Alix (it's pronounced Aleex!), and the other is a guy Emira starts to fall in love with. Alix has moved to Philadelphia from NY and is trying to solve her resulting identity crisis by making Emira her best friend. (The guy is basically just some guy; he gradually contributes to a crisis between Alix and Emira.)

Apart from expertly satirising white liberals, the novel points out how the white nuclear family (still) depends on the labour and even the love of PoC. Emira feels deep affection for Alix's daughter and is ambivalent about her own role as a caregiver; I appreciated how seriously this affection and ambivalence were taken. (Alix's daughter could have been treated satirically too, e.g. as a spoiled brat, but she is more thoughtful than some of the adult characters, which gives the novel more depth.)

The dialogue is ridiculously good; there is a lot of code-switching and it all felt 100% plausible, including the conversations between Emira and the Guy, which make their relationship feel familiar and sweet enough to be believable.

Why not 5 stars? One of the reasons I enjoyed it is that Alix's behaviour is eye-poppingly cringy, so there's an element of schadenfreude. However, that means that I was able to think (like most white readers), „Well, I've never snooped on my black babysitter's text messages/bribed her with expensive wine to get her to confide in me/etc, so I’m definitely not a self-deluding racist like her.“ Relatedly, the main white characters get a lot of attention -- and sometimes Emira comes across less clearly than they do (e.g. her backstory is painted less vividly than Alix's). At the end, I wanted to move past the question of which white character was the worst, and we're not quite allowed to do that - but maybe that sense of being trapped is part of what Reid intended.