By Megan Thomas
I mentioned in my review of People Person by Candice Carty-Williams that I’ve been meaning to read Queenie for a while and although it’s risky business reading an author’s second novel before the first and risking seeing the quality reversing, I loved Queenie… More than People Person, I think.
Perhaps the reason is because I felt like I knew Queenie Jenkins so deeply after reading. She is going through A LOT and for most of the reading experience, I felt like one of her friends receiving updates in a friend Whatsapp group. The reader joins Queenie on a turbulent year of being single, which is filled with a lot of sex, relatively little satisfaction, and arguably negative affection – apart from from her closest friends, who reveal themselves when she needs them the most (or don’t).
What’s impressive is how Carty-Williams has managed to realistically capture the total self-absorption of being a heartbroken 25-year-old and how life’s priorities can be all over the show during that time in life. Queenie has been through a lot more traumatising experiences in her life, and of course these play into her unravelling after she is broken up with (THEY WERE ON A BREAK), but it’s never quite that simple, is it?
Part of the reason Queenie’s relationship ended, starting this year of spiralling, was due in a large part to the suppression of childhood trauma and abuse. However, it doesn’t suggest that just getting on with it is all you need to come out the other side, even if that’s how Queenie’s Jamaican grandma has always had to do it. “Maybe if all ah we had learned to talk about our troubles we wouldn’t carry so much on our shoulders all the way to the grave”, her grandfather says in response to this. You can’t break a cycle without changing something, Carty-Williams reminds us, and it’s often something that only you can catalyse… as much as some rather outrageous sexcapades may seem like the answer at the time.
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