"Queenie" by Candice Carty-Williams
Queenie is one of those books I picked up because of an undefinable sense that I needed to read it. I didn’t know anything about it or Carty-Williams, other than that a number of people had listed Queenie in their must-read lists over the last couple of years. And boy, reading it was the right choice.
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.
Let me take you through my emotional thought processes as I read through this book.
First, I wanted to take Queenie by the shoulders and shake her to make her see how much she was sabotaging herself and to stop making such poor decisions.
Then I moved on to wanting to shake the men in Queenie's life who were the ones forcing her into making such poor decisions.
Then I wanted to shake her family and friends, as it was them who had created a world where Queenie could be forced into making such poor decisions.
And finally, all I wanted was to burn down the establishment and the inherently racist world which had created all these characters who had, in turn, created the version of Queenie who would make these poor decisions. While at the same time profusely apologising to Queenie for ever thinking any of this was in any way her own fault.
Through the character of Queenie, Carty-Williams creates a depiction of a world I simply don't see. And not only that, but they do it in a way that comes across as so real that, at times, it makes you so incredibly angry. Queenie is a strong, intelligent young woman stuck in a world designed to keep her quiet and keep her down. She's not passive, far from it. She knows who she wants to be and who she should be. It's just that the world has forced her into a particular box and then worn her down until the idea of fixing her problems feels impossible.
This can be a hard book to read. Queenie's relationships range from passive to outright abusive, and all of them overtly racist. But through it all, the descriptions are plain and emotionless. Almost clinical. And that's what makes them stand out. In a fair society, each encounter Queenie has should be a horrifically traumatic experience. But to Queenie, they are simply what her life is; a constant string of traumas reinforcing her mental health issues to the point that she no longer even recognises them as traumas.
Something that threw me when I looked at other reviews of this book was the number of people who apparently hated it. And the biggest complaint was a perceived lack of realism. But I feel this is missing the point. Queenie is not a subtle story. You won't find tiny nuances and layered characters. In a way, the characters feel more like representations than rounded characters. Each one is a type. Not a stereotype, but a type. Queenie's three best friends are each a type of person you might have in your life. Queenie's sexual partners are each a type of man any woman like her might encounter. Queenie's work colleagues are all types of people we know from working in an office.
But none of this is a bad thing. In fact, in some ways it makes it a lot easier to take in the themes of the story.
Queenie is a powerful and, at times, difficult read. Hilarious and relatable at times, only to swing to stark and painful. Carty-Williams creates a character and a world that feels all too real at times. Their style may not be subtle, but that doesn't take a single thing away from the story or the character. If you're like me, once you get going, you'll find yourself desperately rooting for Queenie while despairing at whether there will ever be space in the world for her to heal.
Trigger Warnings: Sexual assault, mental health, racism
