Queenie
by Candice Carty-Williams
Contemporary Fiction
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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.
This was such a BRILLIANT book, and the only thing I didn’t like about it was that I hadn’t gotten around to it sooner!
Queenie is a hilarious contemporary novel that follows the life of our titular character as she has to come to terms with big changes in her adult life. Her boyfriend has just told her he wants to go on a break, she meets some challenges in her work-life and she spends the majority of the book making some questionable decisions that lead her to the trouble she finds herself in.
I geniunely don’t have a bad word to say about this novel! The prose was so fun and written so vividly and uniquely. I read this so quickly because the story and the writing was just so delicious to devour, I could barely put it down. Carty-Williams effortlessly weaved humour from the very first page to the very last, even though the book deals with some serious and quite dark themes at times.
As for the main character of Queenie, she’s definitely a protagonist I won’t be able to forget for a long time! She was so authentic, so flawed, so funny that I couldn’t help but root for her from the first line. Carty-Williams has surely crafted such an unforgettable character that will go on to be remembered in the same vein as Bridget Jones and Elizabeth Bennett.
This is honestly the perfect gift for people at Christmas, such a life-affirming novel that does portray the modern British woman in one of the most realistic and authentic ways I’ve read before.
THE ROYAL BOOKSHELF 