Queenie by Candyce Caty-Williams

Perhaps because the cover I have of this book is neon pink I was convinced it would be a sweet romance but this ended up being much darker and dramatic than I could have anticipated. Also, I loved this book much more than I thought I would, even if I sometimes wanted to scream at the main character (red flag, RED FLAG! RED FLAG!!!!!) 

Queenie is a twenty-five-year-old English girl from a Jamaican family living in London. She has what many of us would consider a dream job – she works as a writer for an important newspaper. She has a group of supportive friends. She lives with her white boyfriend in a flat they rent together. All seems perfect but it couldn’t be further from the truth. She’s struggling with her relationship – her boyfriend is slowly breaking up with her, saying she’s ‘too intense’ and accusing her of always messing up things with his family (who are a bunch of, well, entitled racists, for the most part, but also the kind of racist people who would openly deny being racist…) She may not be able to be who she really is around her family. At work, her bosses would discourage her from writing anything remotely political or critical because they don’t think there’s an audience for it. As for her friends, not all of them are as supportive of her as it may seem; her friend Rebecca for example seems to secretly enjoy lending her money whilst at the same time questioning a lot of her life choices (for context here, Rebecca is white from an affluent family, Queenie is the first person to go to university in her family and has been brought up by her grandparents and her aunt as she has an absent mother and a father she never knew).