Queenie

Twenty-five year old Queenie (celebrations of her twenty-sixth birthday party are a key turning point in the narrative) is the book’s central character, its protagonist and narrative. She is black, and of Jamaican heritage, and lives in England, in the mostly black borough of Brixton, in London. She is also the first person in her family to have gone to college; she has a promising, entry-level position at an up-and-coming news magazine; and she has a supportive circle of friends. As the story begins, however, she has also been struggling with several challenges: she is haunted and pained by what she sees as past experiences of abuse and abandonment; her relationship with her white boyfriend is falling apart; and, perhaps most significantly, she has been struggling all her life with the difficulties associated with being black, and specifically with being a black woman, in frequently racist Western...