Book Review: Queenie

15.09.2020

Book Review | Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams

It must be almost impossible for anyone with even a passing interest in books not to be aware of Candice Carty-William’s Queenie. When it came out back in March 2019 it appeared in the windows of Waterstones in an eye catching display, the cover art printed in four different colours: pink, blue, minty green and orange. I, like many other book obsessives loved it, and had no idea which one to buy. In the end, indecision and my ever lengthening TBR list got the better of me, and I didn’t buy any of them.

Regardless, I loved the sound of it and the interviews with Carty-Williams that I read were great, so it continued to stay on my mental to-read list (and my virtual one thanks to Goodreads) since then. Then suddenly it shot back into the public consciousness in a big way after the death of George Floyd was the catalyst for widespread Black Lives Matter protests. The spotlight was now firmly on the way that systemic racism underpins so much of society and for the publishing world that meant attention being placed on how the stories of Black individuals are represented. Are Black people being able to tell their own stories? Are they getting published? As Own Voices books started being recommended all over social media and in newspapers and magazines, one of the novels I saw being cited over and over again was Queenie. So when I wandered into WHSmiths after lockdown relaxed to pick up some ever-important post it notes and saw a copy with a shiny gold cover (yes, I know, another colour!) sitting on the shelf I didn’t hesitate to snap it up or to start reading it straight away.

Long story short: I like it a lot. The novel is told in the first person and I found that Queenie was a very clear, believable character. As a Londoner, and a woman, there were many aspects of the character and her experiences that were relatable to me and I enjoyed the deep dive into mental health and relationships that the novel takes. In most other ways Queenie is different to me. I loved reading about her family, I loved how she played with the Jamaican patois her Grandmother slips into when she’s especially passionate about something and just the way in which the writing reflected the difference between the way she spoke with that of her Aunt, her cousin or her Grandparents. I particularly enjoyed the relationship she has with her Grandparents, one moment of which in particular was the most powerful in the book for me.

The story is big and real and messy. We meet Queenie at a gynaecology appointment (which really sets the tone for the novel) that her Aunt Maggie has accompanied her to. The information she learns in this appointment is part of a bigger series of events that she’s struggling to cope with. Without giving away too much I’ll simply say that we soon discover Queenie is dealing with a LOT of stuff at once and, despite her friends’ attempts to help, her life is unravelling and she’s starting to go into freefall. Dabbling in self-sabotage in the shape of unsuitable men, sexual encounters, drinking and letting her work at a magazine slip, she starts to risk losing everything she still does have.

There’s a lot going on in this book but I thought that worked really well. Carty-Williams pulls together a solid narrative but allows a cacophonous mess of issues to swill around in the background. This is what life is like though, particularly when rugs are being pulled out from underneath your feet and when you’re struggling to work out which problem to deal with first. I felt frustrated with Queenie a lot of the time. She made terrible decisions and behaved in a selfish way so much of the time that I wasn’t always on her side. It was a combination of seeing how much her friends loved her and being aware of the maelstrom inside her mind that made me hang on in there.

One of the issues Queenie is dealing with is also the racism that she comes into contact with often in her everyday life. There were various examples of this and, although I’ve recently been trying to better educate myself through listening and reading more, this felt like a way to experience what it’s like for a Black woman in London through her own eyes. The scenes I found the most affecting were the ones in which Queenie’s White boyfriend Tom makes allowances for his Uncle’s racist remarks at family occasions and, often, Queenie would end up being the one to apologise. I think that these scenes really get under the skin of how these individual moments build up to a much larger problem in our society.

Though this is a book I really enjoyed and would recommend, there were a few issues that stood out for me and have continued to play on my mind. There’s one twist in the storyline that I won’t delve into for spoilerish reasons but it just felt quite tenuous in my opinion. Happy to discuss once you’ve all read it yourselves! I also felt that while Queenie and her family were really well defined characters, many of those around her felt a little functionary. Every single man she encountered was awful and Darcy seemed to have a whole backstory that was never dealt with at all. What happened with Simon!? That leads me into the biggest issue I had. It’s actually something I’d briefly seen someone else comment about and decided to wait until I’d read the book before I engaged in any way with it but it was impossible to avoid once I began reading. One of Queenie’s friends, Cassandra, is Jewish. That in itself is not a problem. However the ways in which the character is represented feeds into the way anti-semites often depict Jews and she seems, honestly, to be a bit of a caricature compared to all the other characters. She lends Queenie money regularly but not in a very loving way, instead she runs a tab and seems to enjoy holding some power over her. This naturally makes one think of the stereotype of the Jew as a money lender. She is also in general quite an unpleasant character. No-one else really seems to like her, simply to tolerate her, and while we are presented with many reasons why Queenie behaves badly we don’t get the same information for Cassandra. I, and the girl who initially pointed this out, are both Jewish so it may be that there’s a degree of sensitivity there. I tried to put this aside when I read, I appreciate for example that this happens regularly to Black people, that they access mainstream entertainment that either doesn’t represent them or even, knowingly or unknowingly, discriminates against them. I didn’t want to write off all the good in the novel because I was struggling with the depiction of a Jewish person. But still I was surprised that in a book that explores the impact of everyday racism on a Black woman, there doesn’t seem to have been any thought about the way in which a Jewish woman is represented. I think that if Cassandra is supposed to be an unlikeable character that’s absolutely fine, but the addition of the money lending has certainly played on my mind and, after writing this review, I discovered that the same goes for quite a few others too.

All in all I thought Queenie was a multi-faceted debut, a perfect combination of easy reading and deep exploration, and I’d be keen to ready more from Carty-Williams. However I would welcome a bit of deeper dicussion into the portrayal of Cassandra and why that decision was made and not challenged.