I just finished reading Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams. It’s marketed as a ‘Black Bridget Jones’ but it’s so far from that it gives marketing a bad name. It’s much darker. I initially had some trouble getting into the book and understanding the protagonist, Queenie Jenkins, but once I did, the book raced by and I really loved it.
Candice Carty-Williams, a young Londoner, has a flair for story-telling that appears effortlessly authentic. Her title character is a woman you both know and cannot forget. Queenie’s life is in meltdown, and as she goes through a miscarriage, a breakup and the loss of her home and her job, the depression and dysfunctionality that once lurked in her world rise to overtake it.
The book opens as Queenie and her white boyfriend, Tom, take a break from their relationship. Everyone but Queenie knows that Tom is never coming back but she keeps thinking that if she changes this or improves that he will. It obsesses her and she begins to fall apart, neglecting her work even while she fears losing her job.
It’s a haunting downward spiral. Carty-Williams manages to engage the head and the heart, plunging the reader into Queenie’s descent, while simultaneously helping us unpack it. The atmosphere is unsettling. Queenie’s South London neighborhood is shifting beneath her feet, gentrification pushing out the markers of her Caribbean-heritage community, a metaphor for the fragility of her life.
This is the fertile heart of Carty-Williams’ writing: complex dynamics of interracial friendship, of the gaps that exist between generations, layered with the specific intricacy of a Jamaican immigrant family and the blurring boundaries of workplace relationships, are spun into an entertaining seam. Queenie’s best friend Kyazike brings nonchalant humor, while her grandparents offer complicated affection.
But above all it’s Carty-Williams’ treatment of love and sex that darkly elevates her story. Queenie’s substitution of sex for intimacy, her broken body image, her vulnerability to the hurtful racial fantasies presented by white male partners and her battle with trust are all painfully real. Moments of awakening — which unfold at a sexual health clinic, in the back of a car, in an office toilet — are all the more touching for their grotty familiarity.
After losing her job and some of her friends, Queenie moves in with her grandparents and slowly begins to recover her sense of self worth and learns how to cope with some of the pressures she faces, so things are starting to look up at the end.
I’ve probably painted too bleak a picture of the book. Carty-Williams is a skilled writer and she injects humor and there are some wonderful text conversations between Queenie and her group of friends whom she calls the ‘Corgis’ because, after all, the Queen has her corgis.
Give it a shot. Queenie was one of Time’s ‘Best Books of the Year’ and NPR’s ‘Best Books of 2019’. I enjoyed it and I think you will too.
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