Queenie book review

This is a brilliant story.

We’re going to jump right into it because I will absolutely tell you the entire plot of this book. I adored it.

My favorite quote in the book comes from Chesca. I’ll be honest, I had to listen to the audiobook just to learn how to pronounce her name.

One of the most important quotes in the book is:

“You can be any kind of black girl you want to be.”

That quote is so important to the story because this entire book is about judgment.

Judging yourself. Judging other people. Judging relationships. Judging things you don’t fully understand.

You have Queenie going through a breakup, and she doesn’t know how to cope with the fact that her feelings are hurt. So she starts dating, hooking up with different men, and trying to fill the void in different ways.

That leads to her friend Cassandra judging her and calling her all kinds of names.

But Queenie is judging people too.

There’s a moment where Cassandra says, “Sure, I’ll loan you money, but where’s your savings?”

And Queenie basically has to explain that savings are not a given for everybody.

Later you find out Cassandra comes from a wealthy Jewish family, lives with her dad, and gets a lot of financial support from her family. So of course her relationship with money looks different.

Then Queenie is judging her mom.

Her mom broke her heart in a lot of ways, and there were moments where Queenie felt like her mother completely failed her. But Queenie has never raised a child herself, so part of the story becomes realizing she was judging her mother without fully understanding what her mother had gone through.

And then there are the grandparents.

Queenie judges them hard.

If you grew up with a really conservative grandparent, this part of the story is going to hit home. The kind of grandparents who tell you not to stay in the bath too long, who want you downstairs for dinner immediately, who tell you to wash your bowl right after you eat.

Reading those scenes made me miss my grandma so much.

There are just things grandparents can get away with because they’ve lived so long. They’re the parents of your parents, so they move differently.

And honestly, the grandfather ended up being one of Queenie’s biggest allies.

But Queenie had to get over her own assumptions first. She kept thinking, “You’re old school. You don’t understand. Back when things cost three pounds…”

That quote from Chesca becomes one of the starting points for Queenie to really ask herself:

“Is what I’m doing actually what I want?”

That’s what made this story so powerful to me.

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It’s really important to remember that you can be any kind of girl you want to be.

Don’t judge yourself for who you think you should be. Don’t judge yourself for what you think you should or shouldn’t be doing.

Just be the person you want to be.

Bonus story because sometimes we get bonuses around here.

There’s a word I’ve been using for at least the last six years: “Muzungo.”

My husband is Ghanaian, and one of his closest friends is Rwandan, and they use that word all the time to mean white person or white girl in this context.

I had never seen the word printed in a book before.

When I saw it in Queenie, I got so excited. I was like, wow. Representation really does matter because seeing a familiar word in print felt weirdly special.

So would I reread this book?

Absolutely yes.

When I first started Kyla’s Reading Day, this was one of the first books I thought about because I loved it that much. I originally read it over a hundred weeks ago, and it still stayed with me.

That’s always a sign of a great book.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PS72VvQrgzg

Until the next book review, 

Kyla