Category: #humor

Book Review: Queenie, by Candice Carty-Williams

5 Stars

A reviewer has described Queenie as a black Bridget Jones, a comparison that doesn’t convey the full scope of Carty-Williams’ complex, unflinching examination of a young woman and the emotional toll her childhood has taken on her.

Queenie is the story of a 25-year-old Jamaican-British woman who is falling apart, a disintegration that begins when her fiance Tom—the love of her life, who nonetheless tolerates his racist uncle calling Queenie the n word—initiates a break in their relationship, right after Queenie suffers a miscarriage. Heartbroken but determined to view their separation as temporary, Queenie endures several disastrous, even abusive interracial encounters—she fears black men don’t want black women, no matter how light their skin—who fetishize her body, trample upon her self-respect, and even hurl false accusations of harassment at work, leading to her dismissal.

As her life disintegrates, Queenie reluctantly seeks therapy, which uncovers the traumas and multiple abandonments of her childhood. Her eventual healing is demonstrated in a two-hour shouting match with a neoNazi skinhead, where she bravely defends her commitment to the BlackLivesMatter movement.

Numerous characters prevent Queenie’s story from turning bleak: her domineering grandmother, who shelters Queenie when she is fired from her job as a reporter; her hilarious friend Kyazike, whose own dates demonstrate the strength that the weakened Queenie must learn to show; and her empathetic colleague Darcy, who eases her panic-stricken transition back to work. Her friends, nicknamed the Corgis (like The Queen’s favorites), are full characters in their own right, with idiosyncratic personalities that add depth to the book. Every woman needs a Kyazike and a Darcy in her life.

I happily give Queenie 5 Stars. By the time she deletes Tom’s contact info from her phone, I was silently cheering for her recovery. I can’t wait to read more of Carty-Williams’ writing.

Book Review: Calypso, by David Sedaris

Calypso is David Sedaris’s most intimate book, a tender, funny, and challenging memoir from an author renowned for writing humor that lays bare his own and his family’s soul. In Calypso, he spares no one, especially himself.

The central theme of the book is his sister Tiffany’s suicide and the emotional turmoil that follows.  He writes with great clarity of the mental health challenges that she faced, the fights she inflicted on her family, and his own sanity-preserving estrangement from her. In the aftermath of the suicide, all the Sedaris family has left are strange clues—like a phone number written on her apartment wall—to try to comprehend why Tiffany would take an overdose of prescription medication and tie a plastic bag over head.

Against the suicide’s backdrop, he is forced to face issues around caring for his elderly father, who lives alone and in increasingly-eccentric fashion, determined not to use electricity in order to leave a larger inheritance to the surviving children. More than two decades after his mother’s death, David grapples with residual sadness that she died before he achieved literary success, without their ever confronting her about the alcoholism that left her a mess each night. He expresses his poignant longing to have had the chance to spoil her.

Still, Calypso is about a family drawing closer after a tragedy. Attempting to recreate the summer vacations of their childhood, Sedaris purchases the Sea Section, a duplex on the beach in North Carolina, where he encounters a deformed snapping turtle, a vacationing former FBI Director, and man-eating sharks that fail to terrify his boyfriend Hugh. In their own unique and often-hilarious way, the Sedaris family heals. Every step along their quirky journey is a joy to read.

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