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Summary
Summary
*SOON TO BE A HULU ORIGINAL SERIES*
*ONE of NPR's and TIME 's BEST BOOKS of the YEAR * NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK of the YEAR by WOMAN'S DAY , NEWSDAY , PUBLISHERS WEEKLY , BUSTLE , and BOOK RIOT !*
"A book that sneaks up on you...I am hooked." --Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling author
This acclaimed and "welcome debut from a seriously talented author" ( New York Post ) is a disarmingly honest, unapologetically black, and undeniably witty novel that will speak to those who have gone looking for love and found something very different in its place.
Queenie Jenkins is a twenty-five-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.
"A must-read novel about sex, selfhood, and the best friendships that get us through it all" (Candace Bushnell, New York Times bestselling author), Queenie is a remarkably relatable exploration of what it means to be a modern woman searching for meaning in today's world.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Carty-Williams's smart, fearless debut follows Queenie Jenkins, a Jamaican-British woman, after her longtime white boyfriend, Tom, asks for a "break." Queenie's impulsive behavior (promiscuity; distancing herself from friends) begins to unearth memories of childhood abuse, causing her to make more bad choices in an effort to alleviate her pain. When her career as a newspaper reporter begins to suffer and she's issued her final warning before being fired, she decides to confront her demons head on. To emerge from her crisis, Queenie begins psychotherapy, much to the consternation of her grandmother, who sees Queenie's mental health issues as a weakness she need only be strong to overcome. The result is a novel that stares directly into the pitfalls of being black in white spaces and (through flashbacks with Tom) the challenges of interracial relationships. Carty-Williams doesn't shy from the messiness of sexual relationships, racial justice issues such as police brutality, or Queenie's promiscuity, and the narrative is all the more effective for its boldness. This is an essential depiction of life as a black woman in the modern world, told in a way that makes Queenie dynamic and memorable. Agent: Deborah Schneider, Gelfman Schneider/ICM Partners. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
Hailed as the black Bridget Jones, this is a moving and entertaining portrait of love and race today It would make sense to describe Queenie , the debut novel by Candice Carty-Williams, as an important political tome of black womanhood and black British life, a rare perspective from the margins. It is both those things, but primarily it is a highly entertaining, often very moving story about one young woman's life as affected - in fact, almost destroyed - by her love life, with the politics of blackness permeating the pages. It is rare. It's still so rare that even its most simple, nondescript moments are something to celebrate. Queenie, for example, taking off her coat and putting it through the strap of her rucksack in a London street while flat-hunting. Her Jamaican grandmother calling: "I'm putting the hot water on. Come down for your porridge and wait for it to warm." How often do we get to read of black people in novels making porridge for each other and negotiating their rucksack straps? It's a thing of joy to witness the everyday within a familiar yet still relatively hidden context, particularly when that context has often been shackled to hefty racial themes, its mundane humanity hardly given space to breathe. South London millennial and budding journalist Queenie is, as she herself admits, a "catastrophist": someone who worries about worst-case scenarios, unbearable outcomes, general humiliations and the perpetual lead weight of anxiety. The novel opens with a gynaecological examination introducing three causes for worry: the possible loss of her coil, an undetected pregnancy and a preceding sexual episode bordering on abuse. So begins a difficult and painful journey through Queenie's unfortunate choice of men. There is the Pakistani Muslim BMW driver who addresses her as "big batty" and wants to experience the "forbidden fruit" of sex with a black woman. There's the sex addict she meets at a party who gives her internal bruising; the neo-Nazi encountered on a dating site, also interested in exotic black-girl sex; and the relatively normal nice white boyfriend, who becomes an ex-boyfriend, which is what leads to the flat-hunting, during which she is groped by a Polish estate agent. "Is this what growing into an adult woman is," Queenie asks, "having to predict and accordingly arrange for the avoidance of sexual harassment?" Predictably enough, the novel has been hailed as the black Bridget Jones , and it does bear loose similarities in its portrayal of the conventional female quest for the love of a good man and the realisation that self-acceptance and self-sufficiency are more important. But Carty-Williams goes much deeper than that, casting a full glare on the damaging reductive stereotypes, born of slavery and colonialism, that surround black women's bodies, sexuality and psychology. The gynaecological beginning seems to make a point in itself, and likewise the sexual frankness throughout is refreshing, smartly and accurately rendered by a voice fully in command of its own narrative and intent on setting the record straight. During her schooldays, Queenie was accused of being "white on the inside and black on the outside like a coconut"; her friend Kyazike assured her that she can "be any type of black girl" she wants to be. Ripped to shreds is the enduring stereotype of the "strong black woman": this heroine flails and weeps in a whirl of panic attacks, sleep paralysis and depression, for which her therapist prescribes various cognitive behavioural exercises. There is a touching theme of women supporting each other, and the camaraderie and empathy Queenie gets from her WhatsApp group of friends "The Corgis" are especially affecting. Their text-speak is hilarious, peppered with "KMTs" (kiss my teeth, Jamaican slang), while sometimes the group's varied backgrounds necessitate translations from white-posh to multicultural London English. Kyazike herself is one of the most alive characters I have come across in any novel; she must be read to be believed. Amid this centralising of female experience and friendship there is a sustained awareness of surrounding social and political issues, such as race hatred and gentrification. What happened to that old Caribbean bakery there used to be in Brixton? And how is it that Queenie feels so conspicuously out of place at her local pool, the Brockwell Lido, where she overhears two middle-class white women complaining about the tenants in their second homes? The Black Lives Matter movement crops up several times, and we are called on to mourn the black men dying in droves at the hands of US police brutality. This is an important, timely and disarming novel, thirst-quenching and long overdue: one that will be treasured by "any type of black girl" and hordes of other readers besides.
Kirkus Review
The life and loves of Queenie Jenkins, a vibrant, troubled 25-year-old Jamaican Brit who is not having a very good year." 'My last girlfriend was black.' I looked at my date and blinked, sure I'd misheard him. 'Sorry?' I asked, leaning across the table." But indeed, that's what he said. Just as she heard correctly when "Balding Alpha," a guy she dates later in her annus horribilus, licks her shoulder and comments, "Tastes like chocolate." Queenie's attempts to get over Tom, the long-term white boyfriend who dumps her at the beginning of Carty-Williams' debut novel, send her stumbling through a mined landscape of interracial dating and friendship, including the occasional white stranger who reaches to fondle her hair as if in a petting zoo. Terrified by the continual news of violence from the United States, Queenie is trying to get the paper she works for in London to cover important issues"I'd wanted this job so that I could be a force for change"but her editor responds to her pitches by suggesting a piece on "ten of the best black dresses Me Too movement supporters have worn at awards ceremonies." After all, it's the holiday season, and what people are really thinking about is party dresses! Queenie's main supporters are the three girlfriends who make up a texting group called The Corgis (a reference to the queen's loyal pack of pooches), but one of these relationships is about to detonate due to our heroine's wildly indiscriminate sexual choices, choices that keep her running in and out of the health clinic on a biweekly basis. At least she'll always be able to fall back on the judgmental embrace and reliable hot water of her ultratraditional Jamaican grandparents. Why she ever fell for that drip Tom and why she still loves him so much are never at all clear, but perhaps that's how these things go.A black Bridget Jones, perfectly of the moment. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Asked by her boyfriend, Tom, to move out, estranged from her mother, and beyond bored at work, Jamaican British Queenie is having a rough go. Add to that the miscarriage she just went through, thoroughly alone, and it's no wonder she needs her best friends to hold her up right now, in the form of an active group text. When Tom continues to ignore her and she attempts to mute her sorrows with the attention of altogether disappointing men, Queenie soon finds herself suffering panic attacks and forced to move in with her strict grandparents. London-based publishing executive Carty-Williams creates an utterly knowable character in Queenie, who's as dimensional and relatable as they come as she tries to balance her own desires with what everyone else seems to want for her. Flashbacks show the dissolution of her and Tom's love and why it's so hard for her to accept and reveal the reasons for her distance from her mother. Fast moving and with a strong sense of Queenie's London, this entertains while tackling topics like mental health and stigma, racism and tokenism, gentrification, and the isolation of social-media and dating-app culture. This smart, funny, and tender debut embraces a modern woman's messiness.--Annie Bostrom Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
junk, by Les Bohem, read by John Waters. (Audible.) Waters, a Hollywood veteran both in front of and behind the camera, narrates the Emmy-winning screenwriter's epic story of an alien takeover of Planet Earth, set in present-day Los Angeles. TOO much is not enough, by Andrew Rannells, read by the author. (Penguin Random House Audio.) The star of "The Book of Mormon" and "Girls" on HBO recounts his coming-of-age from a sexually confused Midwestern teenager to finding his footing as an actor in Manhattan. QUEENiE, by Candice Carty-Williams, read by Shvorne Marks. (Simon & Schuster Audio.) The "Endeavour" actor gives voice to a 20something Jamaican-British journalist navigating the trials of interracial dating, in a tale so full of humor she's been called a "black Bridget Jones." sal & gabi break the universe, by Carlos Hernandez, read by Anthony Rey Perez. (Listening Library.) This mystical middle-grade novel set at a magnet school in Miami lends a Cuban-American lilt to the genre of science fiction. remembering Roth, by James Atlas, read by the author. (Audible.) The biographer narrates an intimate homage to the late novelist, with whom he shared a decades-long, but not uncomplicated, literary friendship.
Library Journal Review
DEBUT This long-awaited first novel from Carty-Williams presents an updated take on Bridget Jones's Diary with the story of 25-year-old newspaper editor Queenie Jenkins and her Jamaican British family. In the midst of a prolonged breakup with boyfriend Tom, Queenie experiences a miscarriage and begins to feel adrift. Carty--Williams creates a fast-paced narrative in the form of texts between Queenie and close friends Kyazike, Darcy, and Cassandra. Interspersed are chapters set in both the past and the present, focusing on the beginnings of Queenie's unstable dating history, particularly being fetishized for her ethnicity, along with her evolving relationship with Tom and the racism she experiences from his family. The author takes care when including flashbacks to Queenie's difficult childhood and current efforts to incorporate social justice work into her life, and she is at her best when describing the stigma of mental health within black communities, especially as Queenie's grandparents question her decision to see a therapist. Yet we never fully understand Queenie's yearnings for Tom or why she feels continually drawn to him, and the Daniel Cleaver-inspired character, Ted, could have been better fleshed out. VERDICT Overall, a charming read for fans of women's fiction; Carty-Williams sets herself apart with her relatable and poignant writing. [See Prepub Alert, 10/1/18.]-Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
