Secrets of the dorm: Come and Get It, by Kiley Reid, reviewed

Oh hell, the novel after the Big Book. It’s so, so difficult. David Nicholls took seven years to follow up One Day with Us. Alex Garland gave up after The Beach and went off to write films. Lawyers prevent me from speculating on precisely what it did to Allison Pearson. And Kiley Reid’s Big Book was a joy. Her debut novel Such a Fun Age was razor-sharp, incredibly funny and utterly unafraid: commercial fiction with serious things to say and with wide appeal. It won prizes and sold brilliantly. Of course it’s difficult to follow up. And Come and Get It, whose title is difficult to remember and has nothing to do with the plot, is a classic victim. It’s hard not be sympathetic.

Without sounding like one of those awful creative writing courses currently divesting people of £9,000 p.a. and all their hopes and dreams, most stories start with an ‘inciting incident’ (or, if you’re doing the slightly cheaper Robert McKee version, the ‘call to action’). The magician’s knock on the door of the Hobbit’s cottage; the convict scaring a young boy in a graveyard; Jack Reacher pressing the stop button and getting off the bus.

Such a Fun Age had an absolute whizzer: a black babysitter who came under unjust suspicion for having a white child out at night in a supermarket. Unfortunately, the inciting incident in Come and Get It, which involves a dog, doesn’t happen until three-quarters of the way through the book, when it clearly should have opened it. It also doesn’t happen to the main character. Millie, a well-intentioned dorm assistant at a university in America who is saving up for a house, falls in with Agatha Paul. She’s an academic who also writes a column for Teen Vogue – so astoundingly unethical even by journalistic standards you assume there’s a twist coming (there isn’t).