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A review by beckyyreadss
Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams
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.
Graphic: Body shaming, Child abuse, Gaslighting, Medical content, Miscarriage, Racism, Sexism, Sexual content, Sexual violence, Toxic friendship, Toxic relationship, Cultural appropriation, Domestic abuse, Infidelity, Misogyny, Physical abuse, and Racial slurs