Real Lit Fall Quarter ’21: Such a Fun Age

Real Lit[erature] reads Young Adult fiction and is open to anyone affiliated with UW: students, faculty, staff!

http://tinyurl.com/reallitfunageSIGN UP HERE!

Build community, reduce isolation and enhance campus education by joining a peer-based book club! The UW Tacoma Library, in collaboration with the Center for Equity and Inclusion, is pleased to announce that its award-winning social justice book club, Real Lit[erature], will meet remotely again Fall Quarter 2021!

The goals of Real Lit have always been to create a greater awareness and discussion of the experiences that are being had by our students, staff, and community members. By interacting with narratives that reflect different experiences, it has provided opportunities to dialogue with peers about shared and disparate experiences.

Students, Faculty, and Staff are welcome to join. We strive to be an actively anti-racist space and spend the first session crafting and reviewing community agreements.

We are reading Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age:

A striking and surprising debut novel from an exhilarating new voice, Such a Fun Age is a page-turning and big-hearted 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 twenty-five, 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.-Description from the publisher’s website.

To register for Fall Quarter 2021: SIGN UP HERE!

Free books are given to UW Tacoma students first, on a first come, first serve basis.

Real Lit meets Thursdays 12:30-1:30 via Zoom.