Like a lot of 20-something-year-old Black women, when the novel Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams debuted in 2019, I was quick to get my hands on it. After devouring it in a day, I was left with the frustration and dissatisfaction that many readers shared.
It’s difficult to spend time with a character who seems both familiar and foreign. Queenie is self-destructive and lost, and watching her pine after a white ex-boyfriend who doesn’t care about her and discard the friendships that seemed to be keeping her afloat was tough.
My main frustration was with the way characters and events always seemed to represent something a bit too obvious – the married men she sleeps with, her job where she’s constantly facing microaggressions and the shops she knew as a child that are closing. All these things are grounded in reality, but side by side on the page, at times they felt too stereotypical.
