Queenie has man troubles. She's devastated to learn that her long-term boyfriend, Tom, wants to go on a break from their relationship. She's in love with him and can't imagine life without him, but she's forced to move out of their shared apartment until they figure out their future once and for all.
In the meantime, she attempts to distract herself. She goes to a party where her friends fill out an online dating profile for her. Subsequently, between men she meets on OKCupid, a few acquaintances, and a random hookup she meets in a bar, she spends a lot of time using her body rather than her mind to try to mend her broken heart. But no matter how many partners she spends time with, she can't seem to get her true love, Tom, out of her mind.
The shared house she ends up moving into is damp, dirty and gross, so she spends quite a bit of time over at her grandparents' house. They're old-school Jamaicans and set in their ways. They provide some comic relief, as do group text chats with her friends, dubbed "The Corgis". She also spends an inordinate amount of time over at the sexual health clinic due to her rising number of assorted one-(sometimes more) night stands.
Queenie has a lot of potential (both the character and the novel), but for me personally, there's a bit of a disconnect. It has a lot of elements of (forgive me for the terrible term) chick lit - the snappy, fun dialogue and quirky characters - but there are also a ton of elements that could make for a true thought-provoking drama: Queenie's complex relationship issues, her estranged mother-daughter relationship, crippling night terrors and panic attacks, the Black Lives Matter movement and interracial relationships, as well as Queenie's career hanging in the balance as she tackles her mounting personal challenges.
A word of warning: the sexual encounters with the random men Queenie gets involved with are actually quite horrible and shocking for what at first seems to be a light-hearted novel. They had me cringing and wanting me to grab her from the pages out of those situations to tell her she deserves better than the way she's being treated. Furthermore, while there are flashbacks to her earlier times with Tom, I didn't feel as though I had a complete enough picture of him to care about whether or not they got back together. Some of the characters are downright unlikeable to the point where, again, as a reader, I didn't really care much about what happened with their storylines, while others definitely added likeability and a well-rounded complexity to Queenie's story.
Overall, I'm not quite sure how to rate this one. I really liked certain parts over others and felt that there was a ton of potential. I just felt as though either the lighthearted parts needed to be a lot more funny (doesn't it drive you crazy when a character is doubled over with laughter at a quote that you barely cracked a smile at?) to turn the entire thing into a laughing-at-life comedy or that the author could have taken all of that darker, hard-to-swallow material and made it into more of a sweeping drama. I feel as though the author could have produced a real gem if she'd gone with the latter. It didn't swing quite enough in either direction for me, so I'm going to split this at around an indecisive 3.5-4 stars out of 5. Overall, I thought this was good for a debut novel and would certainly be interested to see what else Candice Carty-Williams writes next.
Judge the cover: 5/5
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