Kiley Reid’s Come and Get it and the (cost of living on) campus novel

Every university seems to have one hall of residence that no one wants to live in. The one that looks like a multi-storey car park, but less appealing. The one with the smell. Its inhabitants refer to it in apologetic, self-deprecating tones; everyone else makes jokes about the sort of people that end up there. 

In , Kiley Reid’s follow-up to her best-selling 2020 debut , that building is the fictional Belgrade dormitory. The rest of the University of Arkansas, Reid tells us, has a “screen-saver, -visit, Scholastic Book Fair beauty to it”, but Belgrade seems exempt from those charms. It is where students are allocated rooms last minute, perhaps after a series of admin errors. Being associated with it has its own niche social stigma. Most of its inhabitants are on scholarships, so the subtext is that they can’t afford to complain; others have transferred from other institutions,