Queenie

I picked up Queenie because everyone kept calling it the Black Bridget Jones and that label annoyed me enough to check. Candice Carty-Williams 2019 debut, published in the US by Gallery/Scout Press at 330 pages in the hardcover, is about a 25 year old Jamaican British woman in South London having the worst year of her adult life. It is funny in places, sometimes painfully so, and political without turning into an essay. I laughed on the bus, then felt guilty for laughing, then kept reading because Queenie Jenkins felt like someone I had actually met.

When we meet her, Queenie works at a national newspaper called the Daily Read, mostly writing and fact checking while watching white middle class colleagues glide toward features she wants. She lives with her long term boyfriend Tom, who is white, in a flat that never quite feels shared. Tom is kind in a vague way and tired in a specific way. He says he needs a break to think. Queenie hears an ending and tries to treat it as a pause.

The opening also gives us the physical shock that frames everything. Queenie goes to a gynecology appointment with cramps and waiting room dread, wishing Tom would answer his phone. The doctor tells her she has had a miscarriage. She did not know she was pregnant. She walks out with paperwork, pain, and a piece of news she cannot find the right moment to share. Back home she keeps packing. Tom does not ask the questions that would let her tell him. That silence sets the pattern for months. She hurts, she minimizes it, she looks for comfort in people who are bad at giving it.

She moves into a houseshare and tries to act like a woman handling a breakup well. Nights out. New bedding. A group chat that stitches together her three closest friends, Kyazike, Darcy, and Cassandra, who did not previously know each other and now have a front row seat. Days at work where she smiles through assignments that sting. Inside she is spinning. She sleeps badly. She misses deadlines. She starts choosing men who confirm the worst things she thinks about herself.

The bad year and the bad men

The middle of the book is a deliberate spiral, and Carty-Williams writes it without flinching.

Queenie starts sleeping with a string of men who each use her in a slightly different way. Adi, Guy, Ted, Saul, and others drift through, some charming at first, some cold from the start. One wants sex without conversation. One wants a story to tell his friends. One turns rough in ways that frighten her and that she struggles to name afterward. She keeps going back to her phone for the small hit of being wanted, then feels emptier after. The scenes are explicit enough to be honest but not written for thrill. They show how low her sense of worth has dropped, and how race shapes even these private encounters. Several of these men treat her Blackness as a fetish, a joke, or an inconvenience, sometimes all three in one evening.

What makes this section hard and good is that Queenie knows better in flashes. She is smart. She can see a red flag from across a bar. Then loneliness or a bill or a bad day at work tilts her, and she texts back anyway. I found myself exasperated with her around page 150, then caught myself. That exasperation is part of the point. Watching a bright friend self sabotage is infuriating and familiar. Carty-Williams lets Queenie be wrong without making her a punchline.

Work slides at the same time. Queenie wants to write about Black Lives Matter protests, about police, about housing, about the London she actually lives in. Her editors steer her toward softer pieces or ask her to explain Black culture to the room. A white colleague named Gina is friendly and clueless in equal measure. Meetings feel like auditions where Queenie has to be cheerful, grateful, and never angry. When a man she once slept with accuses her of harassment after she tries to set a boundary, the complaint process feels rigged. She has to prove she is professional while being treated as a problem. Anyone who has been the only Black person in an office will recognize the fatigue here, the extra calculation before every email.

Her friends try to hold her. Kyazike is steady and direct, the one who says come home now and means it. Darcy is warm and chaotic, good for dancing and bad for advice after midnight. Cassandra is older, more settled, quicker to name what Queenie will not. Their group chat pings through the book with check ins, jokes, and fights. At one point one of the men Queenie has been seeing turns out to be connected to this circle, which blows up trust badly. The friends do not save her neatly. They get tired. They call her out. They stay, mostly, but with limits. That felt true to friendship at 25, when love and irritation live close together.

Family, church, and old wounds

If the men plot is the noise, the family plot is the undertow.

Queenie is second generation Jamaican British. Her mother Sylvie left for long stretches when Queenie was small, leaving Queenie and her sister to be raised in large part by grandparents. Her grandmother, who cooks porridge and prays and keeps a spotless front room, loves fiercely and judges quickly. Her grandfather is quieter, kinder in small acts. Cousin Diana offers cousin closeness with its own rivalries. Church is central, not as background but as law. Respectability, prayer, and keeping business inside the house matter more than feelings.

Queenie carries two older hurts that the book reveals slowly. One is her mother's absence and the story Queenie tells herself about it, that she was hard to love. The other is abuse by her mother's former boyfriend when she was a child, something she buried and minimized for years. Carty-Williams does not use these as twists. She shows how they leak into adult choices. Queenie apologizes too much. She expects to be left. She confuses control with care. A scene where she finally tells her mother part of the truth, in a kitchen with the radio on, hit me harder than any breakup scene because both women are trying and missing.

I liked how specific the household details are. Hair routines. Food. Patois slipping in and out. A grandmother putting the hot water on and telling you to wait for it to warm. Taking a coat off and threading it through a rucksack strap while flat hunting on a London street. These small, lived moments give the book its warmth. They also show why Queenie feels split. At work she codeswitches to survive. At her grandparents house she is told she is too loose, too London, too much. With Tom's family she was once the interesting girlfriend, then the difficult one. Nowhere feels neutral.

Tom himself stays blurry for much of the book, which is intentional. He is not a villain. He is a man who liked Queenie's spark and then asked her to dim it when life got hard. His request for space sounds reasonable until you see how little space he leaves her to grieve the pregnancy loss. Late messages, brief meetings, promises to talk soon. Queenie keeps rereading them like evidence. Letting go of Tom means letting go of the version of herself that felt chosen by him, and that takes most of the novel.

Therapy, leave, and learning to stay

About two thirds through, Queenie breaks in a way that cannot be laughed off.

She stops functioning at work. She cries in places she cannot explain. She fights with friends, misses family events, and feels unsafe in her own head. Her job gives her leave. She moves to her grandparents house in South London, sleeps in a childhood bedroom, and starts therapy after resisting it for months. Her grandmother treats counseling as shameful, a white people indulgence, a sign Queenie cannot pray hard enough. Queenie goes anyway.

Her therapist Janet is one of the best drawn minor characters I have read in a long time. She is compassionate without being soft, practical without being cold. She does not offer magic lines. She asks Queenie to track what happens before she texts a man who hurts her, to notice where she feels panic in her body, to say out loud what happened as a child. Sessions move slowly. Queenie cancels, returns, jokes to deflect, then finally talks. Through Janet, Queenie starts to connect the miscarriage grief, the Tom grief, the work humiliations, and the childhood abuse as one tangled load rather than separate failures.

This is also where the book's take on mental health feels most useful. Carty-Williams shows therapy as work, not rescue. Queenie still has bad days. She still wants Tom to call. She still has to face the harassment complaint and a demotion of trust at work. What changes is her capacity to pause. She starts eating more regularly. She sets one boundary and keeps it. She tells Kyazike the full truth about a bad night instead of a cleaned version. She visits her mother and listens longer before defending herself. None of this is dramatic on its own. Together it reads as a person learning to stay with herself.

The final gathering in a restaurant, with friends and family crowded around a table, works because it does not pretend everything is fixed. Queenie is not cured, coupled, or promoted. She is clearer. She knows she wants work that respects her eye, friendships that allow need, and love that does not require shrinking. She can name what happened to her as a child without apologizing for remembering it. For a book that spent so long in mess, the steadiness of those last pages felt earned.

Where it frustrates, and why it matters

Fair warning. Queenie will frustrate you, especially in the middle third.

She makes the same mistake with men more than once. She ignores good advice from friends you will like more than her for stretches. She is late, flaky at work, and sometimes self pitying. If you need a heroine to be likable at all times, you will struggle. I struggled around the Guy and Ted sections and had to put the book down for a day. When I came back, I saw what Carty-Williams was doing more clearly. The repetition is the illness, not bad plotting. Depression and unprocessed trauma do not learn quickly. The book respects that even when readers want faster growth.

The humor is another divide. Carty-Williams is very funny about group chats, bad dates, office small talk, and family church politics. A few jokes land close to pain, especially around sex and race, and readers vary on whether laughter helps or stings. For me the comedy kept the darker material bearable and made Queenie's voice distinct. She narrates her own disasters with timing, then goes quiet when the joke runs out. That rhythm felt human.

On politics, the book is direct but not preachy. Work scenes show how Black women are asked to represent and soothe while being overlooked. Dating scenes show fetish and disregard without lectures. Family scenes show how migration, faith, and respectability shape views of therapy and single womanhood. If you want a London novel that treats race as texture rather than topic, this is a strong pick. Pair it with Americanah if you want a transatlantic echo, or with Luster if you want an even rawer companion.

I would hand Queenie to a friend in her twenties sorting out love, work, and family, and to older readers who want to understand that sorting from the inside. Read it when you have patience for a narrator who trips. The early chapters with Tom and the miscarriage set the ache. The middle with bad men and office cuts shows the fall. The late chapters with Janet and her grandparents show the slow climb. It is not Bridget Jones with different music. It is its own thing, sadder and tougher and, in the end, kinder to its heroine than she is to herself for most of the book.