Queenie, a young Black woman living and dating in London, is 'complex, funny, broken, fun'
- Written by Melanie Saward, Associate Lecturer, Creative Writing, Queensland University of Technology
Early in the pandemic, I looked after my niece because she had conjunctivitis and couldn’t go to daycare. Despite my best efforts, I caught it. My infection morphed into tonsillitis and I became very sick. I couldn’t read or watch TV properly – which everyone knows are the only pleasures of being sick. So I downloaded the audiobook of Queenie[1] by Candice Carty-Williams and listened in bed with my eyes closed.
Before long, I found myself pausing the book to leave myself croaky, semi-lucid voice notes as I fell in love with Queenie Jenkins. (I should have known, in the middle of my PhD on rom-com, I’ll never read commercial fiction solely for pleasure again.)
Read more: Friday essay: romance fiction rewrites the rulebook[2]
Bridget Jones meets Americanah
Popularly billed as “Bridget Jones[3] meets Americanah[4]”, Queenie is the story of a 25-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, working at a national newspaper, and navigating life after a messy breakup with long-term boyfriend Tom.
Queenie opens in a gynaecologist’s office with a nurse performing an internal exam. It’s got a real chick-lit feel to it – for two paragraphs. But when the nurse brings a doctor into the room for a second opinion, you can feel the shift that indicates this isn’t just another fluffy, formulaic rom-com.