Alix is the mother of the children that Emira babysits. The only thing she does know is she enjoys her babysitting job. It becomes even more apparent how stuck she feels as her friends start getting career jobs with salaries and move into nicer apartments. She has no idea what she wants to do career-wise and feels stuck in the life she is living. Emira is a 25-year-old Black woman who graduated from Temple University with a degree in English. The novel switches perspective between two characters, Emira and Alix. This months’ review will be no different as I will be discussing the book Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid. Here at the Mistress of the House of Books, I will always be proud that since day one, we have stood by our message of being an intersectional feminist book review by choosing books by writers of all backgrounds. At the same time that I am happy they are making this change, it is still upsetting how it took the cultural movement Black Lives Matter for them to wake up to what they were doing. It is incredible now to see how different platforms that sell books are now taking the initiative to feature POC and LGBTQ+ writers. I believe that a lot of readers would come to the same conclusion as me however, I do not think we do this on purpose by any means, in fact, I think it is because most books that are featured for readers to consume are those that fall into the categories of being white, cisgender, and heterosexual. Now I ask that you take a second and reflect on the books you have read and the type of characters that are in them.

I will say that for most of my reading life until University, the fiction books I have read feature exclusively white characters, and to go deeper, they are also cisgender and heterosexual. This year I have grown more conscious of what type of characters are depicted in the fiction books I have read in the past and the ones I am reading now.

A fun age