The titular heroine of Candice Carty-Williams’s Queenie begins the book with her legs in stirrups, undergoing a gynaecological exam. This sets the tone for a debut novel that is a candid and funny, no-holds-barred exploration of a young black woman’s life.
The colour of Queenie’s skin is absolutely not incidental: she is exoticised by men on dating apps, in the street and even in her office. She notes this with humour, exasperated at “men calling me confectionery” as they tell her she “tastes like chocolate”. But what makes Queenie so appealing is that this doesn’t stop her from sleeping with these men — she feels utterly, fallibly real.
The casual sex she has after breaking up with her long-term boyfriend is frequent and random, but what makes it disturbing is that it is violent enough to leave her with injuries that alarm a sexual-health adviser sufficiently for her to recommend counselling. Queenie is funny throughout this: smart enough to recognise that a man she is in bed with is unable to take a second to “step out of his own pleasure and see that I didn’t like what was going on”, but also wry about the sexual-health adviser who looked “like she’d heard it all in the Sixties and was tired of it”.
Although Queenie’s pain is vividly drawn, and the way Carty-Williams foregrounds her physical experience is important, there is lightness, too. There is sisterhood in her relationships with her friends — whom she calls her “corgis” — and the portrayal of her tough-love-espousing Jamaican grandparents is hilarious.
Some of the characterisation lacks depth, and her plotting can occasionally be a little schematic, but these are criticisms that can also be levelled at Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones, which turned into an international phenomenon that millions of readers found resonance with. In some ways, what Carty-Williams is attempting is far harder, as she represents a voice of young black womanhood that is rarely heard in mainstream fiction. Some of the terrain she is covering is also notably more unsettling: domestic abuse, childhood neglect and anxiety are all eloquently touched on.
Carty-Williams is a talented writer with a fresh perspective that the publishing industry desperately needs. Queenie is not a perfect novel, but then it doesn’t need to be: it’s joyous, memorable and necessary instead.
Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams (Trapeze, £12.99)
