QUEENIE IS WORKING ON IT

The further adventures of a single Black woman in South London.

As the title of Carty-Williams’ follow-up to the well-received Queenie (2019, now a Hulu TV series) indicates, her talented but troubled protagonist, now 33, doesn’t quite have her ducks in a row...yet. Having messed things up with her true love a few years earlier, her romantic life now consists of regular booty calls with a well-built public transportation worker who is several tube stops short of Mr. Right. Her work life as editorial director at a media startup is closer to satisfactory: “The Good Sis had been a life-changing place to work, and a far cry from my last workplace, where being the only Black woman in a five-mile radius had seen me go from pet to threat on an almost daily basis.” Now she gets to work on projects she really cares about, currently researching a story titled “The Race to Conceive: The Hidden Hurdles of a Black Woman’s Fertility Journey.” To get an inside look, she goes for a standard fertility checkup. But the bad news she gets there is not about racism. Contrary to her belief that she still has years to organize her life for motherhood, her hormone and egg counts are both low and dropping, and her high BMI disqualifies her for support from the public health system. Spiraling hard and fast, she launches campaigns to lose weight and get pregnant, ASAP. Again, Carty-Williams vividly evokes Jamaican diaspora culture and Queenie’s loving South London circle of friends and family, capturing voices ranging from Grandma—“Lord have mercy, me neva even seh mi prayers before mi drop ah sleep”—to millennial and Gen Z characters, with their emoji- and acronym-filled texts. Queenie herself is an endearing but frustrating character, annoyingly prone to self-sabotage, but many readers will empathize with her difficulty absorbing her therapist’s counsel that “preparing for sadness wouldn’t change how sad [she’d] be even if [her] worst fears came true.”

The blend of funny and serious is not working perfectly, but strong writing and sharply rendered dialogue rescues the read.