Such a Fun Age

"This book brings together a newer narrator and a newer author which sometimes allows you to go in different directions in a way that you would not expect. The book itself is about a young woman who is babysitting. She’s African American and she’s babysitting a child who’s white. She takes the child, late in the evening, to a grocery store and is basically accused of potentially kidnapping the child. It’s a racial incident that we certainly have been seeing in the US. This young lady goes through this experience and then has to return and deal with many different elements. How does she deal with the parents of the child after this? How does she deal with the child? How does it impact her choices in her life, because she wasn’t necessarily deciding to be a babysitter for the rest of her life? There are a lot of elements of what it means to be a young person and to be struggling with your identity, with your economic situation. So it’s very layered, which requires a layered and subtle performance. If you go over the top with these emotional issues it can actually stop the reader from really hearing what is happening, because you just get sucked into a performance as opposed to getting emotionally pulled through the story. And that’s what Nicole Lewis is really good at. She’s finding those emotional moments and getting you super-involved in the character. But she has to play all the characters. She’s also got to play this privileged woman whose child has been sucked into the situation, who isn’t necessarily thinking about what it’s like to be the babysitter and get pulled up by the police and have people in the store attacking her. You’ve got to play these two totally different characters, and they have to be believable. And I think she found an excellent balance of not making the privileged mother of the child a caricature, but really filling out who that person is, finding the humour, making her understandable enough to not dislike her. It’s an important balance. Exactly. And, you know, it is hard for those of us who are not necessarily in a position of privilege, especially economically, to understand someone else’s pain, or someone else’s struggle. Those are different struggles and they can be non-sympathetic, but I think Nicole Lewis did a great job of making both characters understandable, sympathetic and also not shying away from their foibles. It makes this book a very good listen. Again, it wasn’t a particularly short book, but it was one that was inspirational to me to go out and walk. I was constantly like, ‘Oh, I want to keep listening to that.’ So I did a lot of walking when I was listening to this title."