Queenie
-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 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.) Bridget Jones meets Americanah Popularly billed as “Bridget Jones meets Americanah”, 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. Queenie is written by Candice Carty-Williams, a British writer of Jamaican and Indian heritage. Carty-Williams comes from a publishing background. She started out with internships that led her to HarperCollins UK, where she worked as a marketing assistant at the 4th Estate imprint. She was then promoted to marketing executive and started a short-story program for Black, Asian and minority ethnic writers to help them get published and/or represented by agents. She went on to work at Penguin, where she was a mentor for the Write Now program, a […]