I first heard about this book by Kiley Reid on the Nerdette podcast, where Greta Johnson raved about it and then promptly selected it for the podcast’s book club so she could discuss it with a couple other people on the podcast. I thought it sounded interesting, so I went ahead and requested the audiobook from my library. Then one of my friends said it was only OK and another said she had heard that from other people, so she wasn’t bothering to read it right now.
But, like I said, I was already on the list to get the audiobook from my library, and it sounded like there was going to be a lot of discussions centered around this book, so I figured I had nothing to lose by listening to it, especially since it’s not very long.
The book is about Emira, a 25-year-old black woman who’s babysitting part time and transcribing for the Green Party part time while she tries to figure out what she wants to do with her life. Neither of those jobs pays very well, so when her boss calls her an hour or two before midnight on a Saturday night, when Emira is celebrating her friend’s birthday, to ask if Emira can come babysit real quick, Emira is not about to turn down the extra cash – especially when she offers to pay Emira double for the night, plus cab fare.
Emira warns her boss that she’s at a party and has had a couple drinks and isn’t really dressed for babysitting, but the mom is desperate, so Emira goes and one of her friends, Zara, goes with her.
We later learn that the “emergency” that has Emira’s employer, Alix, in such a panic is that someone threw an egg at one of their windows and Alix doesn’t want her two-year-old daughter, Briar, to see the cops. Admittedly, it’s a little weird that Alix is so hung up on it. At that age, kids think any chance to see a cop car is cool and Briar is unlikely to remember much, if anything, from that age, so it’s hardly as though she’s going to be traumatized by it. I’m not even sure a good, old-fashioned egging is really worth calling the cops, but that’s up to Alix.
As it turns out, Alix’s husband is a news anchor on a local news channel and recently said something insensitive about a black guy asking a white girl to go to prom with him. So they’ve been flooded with hate mail and an egg. It’s hardly the end of the world.
After she calls Emira over, Alix suddenly becomes terrified that her black babysitter will find out what her husband said and why the house got egged. She just can’t stand the thought of Emira thinking that they’re racist. Emira either doesn’t know about the incident, or doesn’t care, because it never comes up in any of the chapters she narrates.
I’ve seen reviews where people question what Alix thinks gives her the right to summon her babysitter to her house in the middle of the night, but I don’t see why it’s such a big deal. She acknowledges that it’s a lot to ask and offers to pay Emira double in order to compensate for it. What’s the big deal?
Admittedly, you could make the argument that dangling the offer of extra money in front of Emira is a way for Alix to assert her power over her employee, and I suppose you wouldn’t be wrong. But I still don’t think it’s a big deal. Maybe that makes me the bad person. Whatever.
So Emira and Zara show up at Alix’s house to take little Briar to the grocery store to just hang out for a while until everything calms down. At the grocery store, they talk about looking at the nuts, because that is a thing toddlers are into, and it sounds like a Whole Foods kind of store, but I’ve never known a Whole Foods to be open that late.
By the way, I just want to say that Briar is my favorite. Reid must have spent some time around toddlers because she nailed Briar’s personality, her reactions to things, and how she expresses herself.
So Emira and Zara are hanging out in the nut aisle with Briar, dancing to music that Zara is playing on her phone. A nice-looking white lady smiles at them, and then promptly goes to report them to the store’s security because she thinks Emira and Zara might have kidnapped Briar, although Zara has headed out for the night by the time the white lady reappears with racist backup.
So she shows up again with this mall cop and they both start asking Emira questions like “have you been drinking?” and “you don’t look like a babysitter.” Then they start asking Briar questions as if Emira isn’t even there.
Emira tells them over and over that she is Briar’s babysitter, points out that the grocery store’s security guard isn’t even a real cop, and that she’s probably getting paid more than he is right now.
Then she notices some white dude filming everything on his phone, telling Emira her rights and telling the non-cop that he has the right to record this. Emira is horrified to have her humiliation on video, but her first instinct is to block Briar from the camera.
Things are not going well for Emira, so she finally says she’s going to call Briar’s dad so he can come over and explain everything. She tells everyone that he’s an old white dude, so they’ll believe him. Which is true. They do believe him and apologize before finally letting Emira go.
The guy who was filming everything catches up to Emira outside the store and offers to give her the video. She doesn’t want it, but he convinces her to give him her email address so she can send it to a news outlet and get the non-cop fired if she ever changes her mind. Once she has it in her inbox, she makes sure he’s deleted it from his phone and they go their separate ways, only to meet on the bus again later, whereupon he asks her out and she agrees to go on a date with him.
While they start dating, Alix is trying to make up for what happened at the store by becoming Emira’s best friend, presumably as an attempt to prove how not racist she really is. She gives Emira food and expensive bottles of wine, but also sneaks peeks at her lock screen to see what text messages she’s gotten lately, so that’s weird.
As it turns out, Alix and Kelly (the white guy who recorded the grocery store disaster) dated back in high school. Alix used to slip notes into Kelly’s locker, but when she sends him a note with a detailed map to her house and bedroom, plus the code to get into the house, so they can have sex while her parents are away, the note goes astray and accidentally ends up in the locker of a popular black guy who’s recently won himself an athletic scholarship to college. When he asks Alix if he and his friends can have a party at her place, she “remembers saying no”, but he and a bunch of other students show up anyway and promptly hop in the pool.
When Alix calls the cops on them, the black athlete loses his scholarship because he got caught with cocaine in his pocket. Alix never wanted it to go that far – she just wanted the crashers off her property, and I can’t see what’s wrong with that. But everyone acts like her intent was to make the guy lose the scholarship, so they all shun her as a racist who doesn’t want to share her wealth with black people. Like she put the cocaine in his pocket? And it’s not even her wealth. It’s her parents’ wealth, and how much trouble would Alix be in if they got home and found their place trashed?
Right after that, Kelly breaks up with her and starts hanging out with the black guy who got arrested and his sister and Alix has never forgiven him for it. And I thought I could hold a grudge.
Fast forward to today, and Kelly is now dating Emira and shows up with her at Alix’s house for Thanksgiving after Alix insist that Alix come for the meal (not as a babysitter, she insists over and over again) and bring her boyfriend.
So it turns out to be a super awkward meal and Kelly makes a big show of judging Alix for her wealth and the fact that she hired people to help out for the party. He makes a big display of pushing in his own chair and taking his own dishes to the kitchen. As if anyone cares.
After the meal, Kelly is fuming and Emira can’t really figure out why. He ends up taking her to a John Wayne-themed dive bar, where she is very uncomfortable because JW said some really awful things back in the day. It’s clearly a place for white dudes and Kelly never even thinks about the fact that his girlfriend might not be comfortable there.
Then he makes it worse by telling her she has to quit working for Alix. He gives her some of the details of what went down that night back in high school, and he blames Alix for what happened to Emira in the grocery store, as if Alix was supposed to know that a grown-ass woman shouldn’t go to a grocery store after dark.
Every time he told Emira “you have to” I just wanted to slap him. So hard.
But they get out of there and Emira, once she’s had a chance to calm down, explains to him why he can’t order her around or take her to bars like that. He calms down and it looks like things are going to be OK, but then Alix does the unthinkable.
After the Thanksgiving dinner, Alix does some social media stalking and finds out that Kelly only ever dates black girls, and it looks a lot like he’s fetishizing them, which is its own kind of racism. She confronts Emira about this, but Emira tells her that she’s a grown-ass woman who can tell for herself whether someone is worth dating – but she says it much nicer than that.
But Alix won’t give up because she’s a control freak in serious need of therapy. After Emira uses Alix’s computer to check her email and then leaves to go to the movies with Briar without logging out, Alix checks for Kelly’s name, finds the one email he sent her with the video, and sends it to her husband’s co-anchor.
The video promptly goes viral and Emira and her friends blame Kelly because they assume he’s the only other person who had access to the video.
Alix, of course, takes advantage of the situation to offer Emira a full-time job babysitting, with benefits and everything. They arrange to have an exclusive interview with the local news station at Alix’s house. Zara comes over to help Alix look her best for the camera and overhears Alix asking a friend if she did the right thing by releasing the video.
She rushes back to Emira and tells her she has to quit, but it’s very different from the way Kelly kept telling her she “has to quit.” Zara tells Emira what she overheard and they figure out what happened, but Emira doesn’t want to quit one job without another lined up. So they quickly call one of the organizations that had offered her a job and negotiate their way to a pay and benefit package that Emira can almost live on.
Then they go on live TV, where Emira publicly tells Alix that she’s quitting to work full time for the Green Party. Then she calls Zara in to make a scene and Zara is more than happy to oblige.
Alix, predictably, makes it all about her. Despite claiming that she wants to be besties with Emira, she doesn’t even know that Emira has been working for the Green Party since before she worked for Alix. Instead, she assumes Emira is only going to work there because Alix told her she’s working for the Clinton campaign.
I loved the way Emira quit her job, but I have two problems with this book. First, Alix is portrayed as a successful career woman who is savvy enough to know exactly how to get what she wants. When she gets it and hires Emira to help with childcare while she gets some work done, she slacks off, reading and surfing the internet instead of getting work done.
Wait.
So, she hires someone to help take care of her kids and immediately loses all of her work ethic? How does that happen? I would understand if she were suffering from post-partum depression after baby #2, but given that she showed absolutely no other symptoms of PPD, it seems highly unlikely.
My second issue was that Emira states early on in the book that Alix is “such a mom” who does all the little things that great moms do for their kids. Then the book goes on to show a woman who regularly ignores her kids and is oblivious to their needs and I just don’t understand why Reid felt the need to put that comment in the beginning only to contradict herself.