Queenie
By: Candice Carty-WIlliams
Published Year: 2019
Publisher: Orion
Pages: 330
Summary (Provided by Goodreads): Queenie Jenkins is a 25-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling two cultures and slotting neatly into neither. She works at a national newspaper, where she’s constantly forced to compare herself to her white middle class peers. After a messy break up from her long-term white boyfriend, Queenie seeks comfort in all the wrong places…including several hazardous men who do a good job of occupying brain space and a bad job of affirming self-worth.
As Queenie careens from one questionable decision to another, she finds herself wondering, “What are you doing? Why are you doing it? Who do you want to be?”—all of the questions today’s woman must face in a world trying to answer them for her.
With “fresh and honest” (Jojo Moyes) prose, Queenie is a remarkably relatable exploration of what it means to be a modern woman searching for meaning in today’s world.
First Impression
Definitely was drawn in by the orange cover and the beautiful silhouette. The summary didn’t initially appeal to me, but when I was looking to purchase books by authors of color I remembered hearing lots of positive things about this one so it jumped to the top of my list. Everyone raved about this book, so while the first impression of the summary wasn’t super strong, the recommendations were.
What I thought
Queenie is a 25 year old black woman living in London. Her boyfriend has just asked her for a break and to move out of their shared apartment. Slowly but surely her life starts to unravel as she copes with being single, alone, and black in an ever changing neighborhood of London.
Initially, I really liked this book. A lot of what Queenie was going through hit close to home. I separated from my ex 2 years ago and went through a lot of similar emotions that Queenie did. It’s a very shocking adjustment to go from being with someone to all of a sudden, not. Honestly, the truth and rawness of it made it a little hard for me to read.
Then Queenie starts to cope by sleeping around (which, I couldn’t relate to but could understand why, having read a lot of books and seen a lot of movies). But it’s not just sleeping around, she is doing so with men who treat her like an object and it doesn’t seem to bother her in the least. The blunt way in which this was written made me a little uncomfortable and I continued to find this book hard to read but now in a different way
I understand (sort of) the stigma of seeing a therapist, but the entire book I was just yelling at Queenie to go talk to someone because she had problem upon problem that piled up that she just wasn’t dealing with. In addition to that, while I try to understand her anger towards a lot of things, such as people touching her hair, I did feel like her reactions were overblown at times. I’m not saying that she’s wrong, just it’s a very different reaction than I would have had so I didn’t quite understand it.
I’m very glad that I read this book but I definitely think that it is not for me. Meaning, I am very much not the target audience.
Overall, the book is well written and the story is intriguing. I wanted to see what happened to Queenie and I really enjoyed reading about her friends. But there was a lot of this book that made me feel uncomfortable. And not because it was making me face realities I’ve been denying, like I felt when I read This is My America. There is a lot of objectification that is written in a way that I jut didn’t like and I could see it affecting a lot of other readers too. If you’re ok with scenes like that, I do recommend checking this book out. If not, then I say you won’t be missing out on much.