Come And Get It is the second book by Kiley Reid, author of Such A Fun Age. This review very much sums up how I feel about it (i.e. it’s not good). Set on a university campus and describing the intertwined lives of students, visiting authors and campus administrators, Come And Get It has a very unclear purpose. It is supposed, I think, to be a discourse on money, race and privilege, but what it ends up being is a big old mess.
It also contains yet another lesbian sexual awakening storyline. How can we stop all authors doing this? I would love - I mean this - to read a modern book by a lesbian about actual Out lesbian life. That is interesting and I want to know about it. What I really don’t need is yet another piece of fiction where a straight-presenting woman discovers the joys of sapphism, thank you.
But I know why and how Come and Get It happened and it’s because, as the author of the super-popular Such a Fun Age, Reid will have been under the most staggering pressure to repeat the success, and fast. This conforms to the old adage - is it Martin Amis? - that you spend your whole life up to that point writing your first novel and then you have to write the next one in 18 months. Reid has done the best thing she possibly could, which was to just bang out the second one, swallow the criticism and move on to her third, which I predict will be a dazzling return to form. (Kiss of death.)
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley isn’t published until May. Hannah Swerling from In Case You Missed It lent me an advance copy. She said I was free to write about it whenever, but said, “are you okay with reviewing a book that people can’t read until May?” And I thought about this for a sec and decided: yes.
Anyway, you know when you see an old-timey picture of some hot guy from 1895 or 1912 and it’s a weird feeling? Like you are hot, hot my friend - but also a) in weird clothes with b) bizarre facial hair and c) completely dead.
The Ministry of Time takes that feeling and makes it a whole book. Like, what if you could meet that man? What if you had to live in the same house with him for a year?
Our heroine in this book doesn’t have a name, (unless I missed it, which is very possible), but is a civil servant working for the British Government in the near future. For whatever reason, the government brings back a select number of people from the past, including Commander Graham Gore - real person! - from 1847, who died on an Arctic expedition. He and the civil servant have to live together while Gore adjusts to modern life: learning about bicycles, taking apart cisterns, becoming obsessed with vitamins, being dazzled by Spotify etc. It’s very funny and adorable.
In order to turn this premise into a novel, Bradley has had to conjure up a mad series of events including internal ministerial strife, baddies arriving from the future and so on, and the whole thing teeters on the edge of collapse in the third quarter. BUT, the idea is so wonderful, the charming Commander Gore’s adaptation to modern life is so well done, the love story element is so good that it doesn’t really matter.
My one criticism is that Bradley can’t leave a simile alone, “my heart clear and grey, like rinsed fog”, “the gelid touch of loose cotton on protruding segments of my body would come to feel like misery”, “I lay in my own body like a wretched sandbank”, “a tooth he’d lost to scurvy, the replacement for which shone like a silvery penny in a crematorium”. But I’m nitpicking now, because I am envious: this is a terrific book and I hope it does very well. (Kiss of death!) Pre-order here.
Talking of vintage hotties, I am a slave to Masters Of The Air, which is a WWII drama about bomber crews on Apple TV, with new episodes every Friday.
The two main heroes are Austin Butler and Calum Turner, who play dashing American pilots. “I just love the fact Austin Butler is simply dedicated to smouldering,” observed Camilla Long, via my WhatsApp. Yes! He recently uglied-up for Dune 2, but that’s fine as long as he keeps taking the hunk roles because some of us live for weeks on this stuff. Calum Turner is very cute and not a particularly good actor but who cares.
You know what I am going to say: anyone who swooned at Memphis Belle, the 1990 WWII film about bomber crews starring Harry Connick Jnr, will lose their minds over this, being as it is basically a remake of Memphis Belle, just stretched out to 9 episodes. It is wildly patriotic: you can’t move for soaring violins and trumpets or handsome soldiers being brave. Honestly it’s a struggle not to burst into tears at the opening credits. The last episode airs this Friday and I will be totally lost without it.
What about you? Have you read or watched anything swoon-worth recently?
PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT TO AMUSE AND INFORM THE GROUP IN THE HANDY BOX BELOW.
Publishers make authors create more-more-more fast-fast-fast because they are profit machines, not organizations committed to nurturing and developing talent. The only way Kiley Reid stays "relevant to readers" (aka profitable, which is what her publisher cares about) is if she generates enough content to keep her name alive in press. If she doesn't write books in time or sell enough books, her publisher will not take her on for another contract.
This is why I think it's such a horrible idea for most authors to look for a big publishing deal when they are early in their writing careers. Far better for them, both emotionally and for their own craft, to build an audience through small independent publishers (or even self-publishing, if they can stomach it), so that they can approach large publishers later with an established readership and therefore better bargaining power.
Kiley Reid is one of the EXTREMELY RARE lucky debut authors who got a lot of push power and marketing spend behind her first book and therefore made a (deserved) success of it. But even she is not immune to the profit pressures placed on her by a machine that exists solely to churn out book-shaped products, in order to drive profit, in order to make more and more book-shaped products. Imagine how much worse it is for the more typical debut author, who gets virtually zero attention for their (often equally excellent) first book, therefore sells nothing, therefore is under massive pressure to produce a "better" second book within a year--and often ends up with no writing career after they thought they had made it in the industry.
My caveat here is that I run a small publishing company. But I've worked for several of the largest profit machines in the industry, and I've interacted with the industry in a variety of ways (both on the inside and on the outside). Publishing is not an arts organization. It is a cutthroat, profit-above-anything industry with no regard for all of the wonderful people who work in it, from editors to designers to production folk to authors.
Just finished The Happy Couple by Naoise Dolan. It’s about mid 20s complicated love lives (I don’t think anyone is so boring as hetero!) and emotional hang ups. I really liked it and am very glad I’m not in that tumultuous phase of life anymore.