$0.00$0.00
- Click above for unlimited listening to select audiobooks, Audible Originals, and podcasts.
- One credit a month to pick any title from our entire premium selection — yours to keep (you'll use your first credit now).
- You will get an email reminder before your trial ends.
- $14.95$14.95 a month after 30 days. Cancel online anytime.
-12% $15.00$15.00
Such a Fun Age: Reese's Book Club (A Novel) Audible Audiobook – Unabridged
A Best Book of the Year:
The Washington PostChicago Tribune NPR Vogue Elle Real SimpleInStyle Good Housekeeping Parade Slate Vox Kirkus Reviews Library Journal BookPage
Longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize
An instant New York Times best seller
A Reese's Book Club x Hello Sunshine Book Pick
"The most provocative page-turner of the year." (Entertainment Weekly)
"I urge you to read Such a Fun Age." (NPR)
A striking and surprising debut novel from an exhilarating new voice, Such a Fun Age is a binge-worthy and bighearted story about race and privilege, set around a young Black babysitter, her well-intentioned employer, and a surprising connection that threatens to undo them both.
Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living with her confidence-driven brand, showing other women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains' toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket. The store's security guard, seeing a young Black woman out late with a White child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar. A small crowd gathers, a bystander films everything, and Emira is furious and humiliated. Alix resolves to make things right.
But Emira herself is aimless, broke, and wary of Alix's desire to help. At 25, she is about to lose her health insurance and has no idea what to do with her life. When the video of Emira unearths someone from Alix's past, both women find themselves on a crash course that will upend everything they think they know about themselves and each other.
With empathy and piercing social commentary, Such a Fun Age explores the stickiness of transactional relationships, what it means to make someone "family", and the complicated reality of being a grown up. It is a searing debut for our times.
- Listening Length9 hours and 58 minutes
- Audible release dateDecember 31, 2019
- LanguageEnglish
- ASINB07RLSB7QV
- VersionUnabridged
- Program TypeAudiobook
Read & Listen
Get the Audible audiobook for the reduced price of $8.99 after you buy the Kindle book.
People who viewed this also viewed
- Audible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
People who bought this also bought
- Audible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
Related to this topic
- Audible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
Product details
Listening Length | 9 hours and 58 minutes |
---|---|
Author | Kiley Reid |
Narrator | Nicole Lewis |
Whispersync for Voice | Ready |
Audible.com Release Date | December 31, 2019 |
Publisher | Penguin Audio |
Program Type | Audiobook |
Version | Unabridged |
Language | English |
ASIN | B07RLSB7QV |
Best Sellers Rank | #7,294 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #86 in Coming of Age Fiction (Audible Books & Originals) #366 in Literary Fiction (Audible Books & Originals) #405 in Women's Fiction (Audible Books & Originals) |
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviews with images
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Such a Fun Age’s true gift is in exploring what I’ll call “negative space”: the difference between what someone meant and how that action or characteristic is perceived. The novel balances the remarkable feat of using the exploration of this negative space to propel the action forward while also being smoothly readable. Ultimately, we spend more time in characters' heads than we do in exploring "objective" action, as the characters reflect on where they are in life, others’ potential perception of where they are in life, and where they would like to be. Through the eyes of a white woman in her early thirties and a black woman in her mid-twenties, Such a Fun Age explores race, class and power dynamics, but also aspirational motherhood, self-serving narratives, and the difference between who we think ourselves to be and who we might actually be.
Other reviewers have suggested that Emira, the black protagonist, is not well fleshed out. It is true that Emira’s character has less nuance and less backstory than the two main white characters (Alix and Kelley), but I was still able to get a strong sense of Emira’s immediate desires, her likes and dislikes, and her concerns and fears -- and that was enough for me. Since Emira spends the book trying to figure out what she wants for herself, it seemed plausible that nothing too jarring might have happened in her life prior to that moment. It also seemed plausible to me that she uses her experiences to figure out what she wants, muddling through ‘no’s until she gets to her ‘yes’. Indeed, part of the book’s point is that it is OK to not buy into a hyper-aspirational narrative -- that it is OK to feel fulfilled with what others might consider to be “mediocre”. I’ve also been in a place where everyone seems to know more about what I should be doing and how I should get there than I do myself, so I found elements of both Emira’s and Alix’s internal spaces entirely relatable. Coming into Emira’s life at this moment of pause -- where she knows she must move forward in order to be considered successful but is paralyzed by her internal lack of clear direction -- also makes sense for some of the themes the book explores. During the course of the novel, we see at least three other characters (two white, one black) treat Emira as a blank space on whom to project their own feelings about what she should be doing at this point in her life. This paternalism ranges from the explicit to the unintentional and is always well meant, even as Emira chafes against it. And in rebuffing that paternalism, Emira reminds the reader that she is very much her own person, even if that person is not who the world -- or even some readers -- want her to be.
To the person who said that it is possible for black people to be relaxed with their friends and speak properly, well, duh. Emira and her friends do sometimes speak to each other “properly” -- in person. Sometimes they use a far more casual register; thinking about how I speak with my friends in text and in person, that makes sense, too. I found it completely believable that Emira could receive texts that say, “Trap trap trap trap get that l.l.bean [d**k] gur” (without the brackets and asterisks), and also deploy words like “connoisseur,” as the occasion demanded. I wondered whether the reviewer that wrote this sentence doubting Emira’s language use only had type-A, hyper-aspirational friends.
Lastly, I thought the book's ending provided a nice balance between answering the key plot questions while also leaving space for readers to make their own decisions about some aspects of the characters and their paths. Based on some of the other reviews, your mileage may vary! I would have actually been happy with even more ambiguity, but it seems that many people wanted less.
Emira Tucker is a young African-American woman who works for Alix Chamberlain, a white, privileged social media influencer and feminist blogger, and her family as a babysitter. Emira is 25, just about to age out of being allowed on her parent’s health insurance, and still unsure where her true passions lie and who she wants to be, as she watches her friends around her seemingly seamlessly fit into their adult lives. I thought Emira’s troubles with figuring everything out was well-captured and made me feel less alone with my own experiences with learning how to adult and adjust in what can be an already complicated world fragmented by forces of divisive, isolating modernity and complicated technology.
One night amongst Emira’s continuing journey of trying to find herself, she is called in by the Chamberlain household to babysit last minute so she comes in her clothes from a night out on the town and ready to take young Briar out to Market Depot, a local supermarket for upscale residents in Pennsylvania. In the supermarket after an impromptu dance party with her friend and Briar, Emira finds herself aggressively confronted by a security guard who racially profiles Emira and accuses her of kidnapping Briar, which is all recorded by a near passerby. The fiery tension of the situation is only able to be diffused once Emira calls Briar’s father to explain what has happened.
From here, things only escalate as Emira receives pressure from the recorder of the video, Kelley, and later Alix to share the video to get justice for the wrongful way she has been treated. Alix, while going through some inner struggles herself and being forced to confront parts of own history, immerses herself in Emira’s life with full-fledged enthuse, even going so far as to secretly check her phone, and seeks to demonstrate how progressively informed and politically well-versed she is. But her efforts to prove her progressiveness, no matter if she is well-meaning in terms of the fact that she wants to be knowledgeable about people and their plights, also comes across as shamelessly self-aggrandizing, cloyingly forceful, and painfully heavy-handed.
Additionally, her aims to achieve justice for Emira and her situation also seem to come from a place where she wants to make herself feel better and elevate her to a more savvily poised place than she is. Alix is indebted to the likes of her appearance and how her way of life seems to others and she also assumes she can come in with a magic wand and fix people and what they’re going through, even when it’s unsolicited, especially someone who she sees as having less or in a reverse kind of racism being African-American.
This book covered a lot of important topics that are worth thinking about and having discussions on, but the ending fell incredibly short for me, apart from all the other ways the book succeeded at satirizing troubling parts of American culture and bringing them even more to light in all the ways they can be present and impact the daily lives of white people and African-Americans, who are living the pains and dangers of being accused of crimes they didn’t commit and being viewed through a harmfully particularistic lens in that people see and presume what they want to and then run with it in tragically unsettling ways. They let their views of someone fit into their generalized narratives and allow themselves to disappear into the depths of their own echo chambers and that has to continually be discussed if it is to be addressed.
Top reviews from other countries
Reviewed in Mexico on January 31, 2021