Queenie: Book Review

Queenie – Plot Summary

Queenie Jenkins is a 25-year-old Jamaican British woman. Having just broken up, sort of, with her long-term boyfriend, Queenie launches herself into a series of terrible decisions. As her self-destructive behaviour starts to catch up with her, Queenie has some questions to answer. What does she really want from her life? Who does she want to be? Can she really be ‘enough’?

My Thoughts

Queenie is the debut novel by Candice Carty-Williams. It’s been compared a lot to Bridget Jones’s Diary, and I guess I can see why. There’s a frankness about both, the main characters being open about feeling out of place or kind of a mess. Queenie can, at times, be very funny, so it shares that with Bridget Jones. This book is a lot darker though, and a far more challenging read.

Queenie as a character, while quite fun, is frequently frustrating. She makes awful choices, often the same ones over and over again, often without a lot of self-awareness in evidence. The book never implies we’re supposed to approve of her, which helps. It seems clear that our frustration is intentional, perhaps mirroring the frustration Queenie feels with herself. Even so, there’s only so many times you can watch a character make the same mistake before it gets boring.

For more about writing unlikeable characters, check out this post.

Not to say the book is boring, because it isn’t. While I wouldn’t call humour one of its defining features, it nevertheless has some very funny moments. There are some great text conversations between Queenie and her friends, ‘The Corgis’, for example. I thought the friends were fascinating and well developed. Kyazike was my personal favourite, but they were all interesting in their own right.

There’s a lot of sex in the book, pretty much all of it spectacularly unsexy. The author does a great job of conveying how little Queenie is actually getting out of her random sexual encounters. As uncomfortable as it was to read, I think it’s well contextualised. Queenie isn’t criticised as a character for having a lot of sex, but she knows the way she’s going about it isn’t fulfilling her. I do wonder if we needed quite as much of the rubbish sex as we got? But I see the narrative point of it. Also worth noting, some of the sex is aggressive as well as unpleasant, which might be triggering for some readers.

The book takes a fairly major shift in tone in the second half. It shifts the focus from Queenie’s day-to-day experiences to a bigger-picture look at how race and mental health intersect. These are important topics, and I thought it was the strongest part of the story by far. I wished the author had been able to bring those topics into the earlier part of the story more consistently. Although, the first-person narrative does mean we’re limited to Queenie’s current level of self-awareness, so it makes sense that the story unfolds in the way it does.

For more about the pros and cons of different narrative perspectives, check out this post.

Conclusion

I think Queenie is an important book, and a well-written one. It wasn’t exactly an enjoyable read though. Comparisons to Fleabag are probably more apt than those to Bridget Jones, although again it oversells the emphasis on comedy a bit. I love that the book brings some much-needed diversity to the conversation about being a young woman today. I also love the exploration of mental health, and cultural stigma around seeking help for that. I even kind of love the honest, if unpleasant, portrayal of deeply unsatisfying casual sex. Honestly, I just wish I’d also loved reading the book.

You can buy Queenie on Amazon.