Reviews with content warning for Child abuse - Queenie

Reviews tagging 'Child abuse'

Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams

89 reviews

chris_reads's review against another edition

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dark emotional funny inspiring slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

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hippiequeen's review against another edition

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dark emotional funny reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This book was great; what pulled me in were the promised “Bridget Jones vibes” but I definitely got way more than that. Reflective about race, mental health and identity. A portrait of the Millennial generation, I think it was great.

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plantybooklover's review against another edition

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dark emotional hopeful informative medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

spoiler alert ** In this novel we meet Queenie, a young 25 yr old who's gone through a sudden "break" with her long term Boyfriend whom she had assumed she was going to marry. Queenie works at a national paper- and has some devoted friends and a fairly good relationship with her Jamaican Grandparents and immediately it's easy to get sucked in to this well written story.
Set in current times (but neatly avoiding the Pandemic) Queenie unfortunately starts quite a downward spiral after her breakup. Her work suffers, her friends have to listen to long ongoing discussions all revolving around her entirely and she starts to go out with just any man who happens to turn up. These men are hideous, and awful, and Queenie continues to blandly see them, and announce her wild sexual exploits at work. Eventually this catches up to her and she is wrongfully accused of sexual harassment and made to leave the office. Throughout the novel, Queenie highlights struggles faced by black women- being sexualized and fetishized, having their hair appropriated and touched by everyone and anyone, being stereotyped as a loud or angry woman. Queenie faces them all.
To be honest, I found myself not liking Queenie very much- for the most part- and through most of the story- Queenie is entirely focused on how Queenie sees the world and what/how the world can provide for Queenie. She seemingly has no insight into her own behaviors and no real interest in the lives of others- there's very little character development of any of her 3 friends or even her mother or aunt, probably because Queenie is only aware of Queenie. We have all had friend where it's their show 100% of the time.
That said, when Queenie essentially loses her job, she ends up in therapy. Through therapy- Queenie does develop a touch of insight, realizing some things about her very traumatic childhood, and is able to emerge from her downward spiral. She's reinstated at her job, and returns with an intention to actually work- which she follows through on. The ending recaps what Queenie calls her "nervous breakdown" and how things seem to be on the up and up- for her, her mother and most of her friends. By the end, I was cheering for Queenie, although honestly, I'm not sure I'd want to be her friend since it seems like it would just be a Queenie support role...
I think this book was so well written and it was very interesting. I did the audio book- which made the book much more palatable for me. I do recommend, but it strikes me as missing an intended mark and landing between a fun gal-pal beach read and a serious commentary on the situation of the world from the lens of a black woman.

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marissasa's review

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emotional funny hopeful sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

This story is a realistic and sharp look at a Black-British 20-something woman's life and struggles. I read most of the book physically and listened to a few chapters on audiobook, which was very entertainingly British and Jamaican with all the narrators' accents. Queenie herself is a deeply hurt and traumatized character, who for the first part of the book continuously makes bad choices and spirals deeper and deeper into her messy situation. Throughout it all you get to see her struggle with her suffering but also slowly start to realize her own role in her pain, but the writing very intentionally showed this growth in a humorous and relatable way through Queenie, her friends, and her family's unique voices. I loved that each character felt like a real person and had their own motivations and personalities, even the smaller side ones. The character development in this book was really well done, and showed the wide range of both positive and negative relationships that young women today may find in their lives. I found myself both cringing at her choices and rooting for things to go right for her, which made her feel so realistic and so human and relatable. I loved seeing our flawed character begin to accept that she has issues and actively try to get better for her own health and happiness through therapy and setting boundaries. So much of the dialogue and humor in this book felt like things I would talk about with my own friends in real life, and I genuinely felt like the use of email and text messages in this format added to the book in meaningful ways. I'm so glad Queenie got a realistic but positive ending that felt satisfying but not too cliché.

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spy_indeed's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

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beckyyreadss's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

I wanted to read this book as I've heard so many good things about it. My wonderful friends bought this book for me for my birthday. This book was not what I was expecting it to be.

This book is based around 25-year-old Queenie Jenkins who is a Jamaican British woman living in London and she is 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.

Wow, this book was difficult and it’s only when I was about 50% through that I realise that this is about her mental health . . . and I think that was the point of it. It was very hard-hitting and brutal and shows you how mental health can affected different people and not even realise it until they’ve hit wrong bottom. Queenie had a lot of bad stuff happen to her from the moment of page 1 up to the last chapter and you can see how she handles it and how things got worse and worse. I would 10000% as always check the trigger warnings with this book as it was brutal and the way that Candice describes Queenie’s mental health can be a bit triggering. I didn’t have anything to hate about this book, I just thought it was really slow-paced and heavy.

I would love another book to see how Queenie is doing later on in life, when she’s back on track but not as a chick flick or anything like that. Just a little novella on how Queenie and the Corgis are doing.

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