QUEENIE by Candice Carty-Williams

A true delight of a novel - sparkling writing, original and very diverse characters each with their own wonderfully real voice. Yet beneath the funny and tortured surface plot, much deeper issues, worries and problems claw their way out to the surface. This story could be read by anyone and labelled as a Bridget Jones for black women. But by the sheer virtue of being about black women it immediately opens up numerous challenges that Bridget, in her white middle class world, never even had to look at, let alone deal with. There is a much darker side to being a young, single, smart career woman.

So young Queenie has the double whammy really - not only is she 25, highly career minded, looking for love and failing dismally, with the best bunch of girl friends one could ever hope to have. This gorgeous young woman is also dealing with being a black woman and all the challenges that can bring.  How dark she is, how white on the inside she is, how her hair is, how her figure is, how she dresses, how 'involved' her proud Jamaican grandmother and aunt are in her life, and most damaging and appalling really the ghastliness she has to deal with from men - none of whom are black like her.

The novel opens with Queenie undergoing a gynaecological  exam, the outcome of which plus the  recent dumping by her long time boyfriend tips her into a cycle of self-destruction, the root of which would appear to be her troubled mother abandoning her at the age of 11 to the care of her grandmother and aunt. Throughout the story we anxiously follow the self-destruction, her on-line dating, her sabotaging of her job as a writer for a newspaper, her wonderful friends always on the fringes giving her advice and support with delicious wit. Over a number of months Queenie does find her way out of the mire - after all in true Bridget Jones' fashion there is nothing like the optimism and energy of youth to keep one going, and we have to have a happy ending.

The deeper themes however hover over the exuberance and crazy path Queenie finds herself on. #blacklivesmatter makes an appearance, the awful men she encounters, how crucial it is to know and like one's self before finding love with others, and how white the world is that black people have to live and function in. It is humbling to read that the daily struggles of educated and smart young black people can be burdens and experiences that their white co-workers and friends will never have to cope with or overcome.