Queenie

"Queenie has been pitched as Black Bridget Jones, a label one could find a bit offensive. But author Candice Carty-Williams has no such qualms, as long as it gets people to read her book – in fact, she came up with the phrase. Carty-Williams’ desire to handle race bluntly and clearly, yet refuse to be dogmatic about it, just as she was with the label Black Bridget Jones, is what makes her debut novel sing. Her heroine – a young black woman in the U.K. struggling to make it as a journalist while also figuring out money, family and love – brings you into her world as if she’s known you forever, right from the start; the opening scene of the book has our heroine enduring an OB-GYN visit from hell, narrating the whole ordeal while in stirrups. This book is equal parts millennial comedy and treatise on modern race relations, and a work of fiction that leaps from the page as all truth, no filler."