Queenie Is Working on It by Candice Carty-Williams: Growing older doesn’t always mean growing up

Some characters are easy to love even when they’re making terrible decisions. Queenie Jenkins has always been one of those characters. But while I adored watching her stumble through her twenties in Queenie, I found myself sharing her friends’ frustration in Queenie Is Working on It, Candice Carty-Williams’ highly anticipated sequel releasing July 2, 2026.

Nearly ten years after readers first met her, Queenie is thirty-three and appears to have her life together. She’s the editorial director of a successful media network dedicated to amplifying Black women’s voices, she’s completed years of therapy, and she’s spent time intentionally stepping away from dating while she worked on herself. Compared to the woman readers met in Queenie, she’s come a long way. Or at least that’s what it looks like on the surface.

When a medical appointment reveals troubling news about her fertility, Queenie suddenly finds herself questioning everything she thought she knew about her future. Surrounded by friends who seem to be effortlessly finding love and starting families, she becomes increasingly preoccupied with whether she’s running out of time. As family pressures mount and her grandfather’s health declines, Queenie begins making a series of questionable choices that threaten the progress she’s worked so hard to achieve.

One of the things I loved most about Queenie was how authentic the titular character’s struggles felt. She was messy, impulsive, self-destructive, and often frustrating, but she was also young and carrying enormous amounts of unresolved trauma. Many of the mistakes she made in her mid-twenties reminded me of mistakes I made in my own early adulthood. Watching her eventually recognize that she needed help felt powerful because it represented genuine growth.

By the end of that novel, Queenie understood that she couldn’t continue living the way she had been. She needed therapy. She needed healthier relationships. Most importantly, she needed to learn how to value herself. And to Carty-Williams’ credit, Queenie has done that work between books. She has a therapist. She journals. She understands her triggers. She knows coping techniques and breathing exercises. She even spent several years avoiding relationships so she could focus on healing. Unlike the woman we met in the first novel, Queenie now has tools. That’s what made this sequel so frustrating.

The mistakes Queenie makes in Queenie Is Working on It aren’t quite as catastrophic as the ones she made in Queenie, but they are often harder to excuse because she should know better. Time and again, she ignores obvious red flags in men who clearly aren’t worth her time. At one point, she’s obsessively texting a man whose last name she doesn’t even know while she’s supposed to be paying attention during a work meeting. Elsewhere, she seems determined to convince herself that situationships are meaningful relationships despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

I wanted to shake her. Like Queenie’s best friend Kyazike, I found my patience wearing thin as the novel progressed. There’s a difference between watching someone learn difficult lessons and watching them repeatedly make the same mistakes after they’ve already learned them.

The fertility storyline is where this frustration becomes most apparent. The news Queenie receives is genuinely devastating, and her fear, grief, and uncertainty are completely understandable. However, as she spirals, she increasingly loses sight of the people around her. Her world narrows until everything becomes about Queenie and her problems.

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What troubled me most was how selfish she becomes. She struggles to celebrate her friends’ accomplishments. She forgets important things happening in the lives of people she claims to care about. Conversations become one-sided. Relationships become transactional. At one point, I found myself wondering whether some of the behaviors I previously attributed to trauma might simply be part of Queenie’s personality.

That realization changes the reading experience considerably. In the first novel, Queenie’s messiness felt relatable. Here, it often feels exhausting. Her constant declarations of unworthiness eventually began to feel less like genuine self-doubt and more like a familiar script she returns to whenever life becomes difficult. There were moments when her self-loathing felt almost performative, as though she had become comfortable defining herself through her suffering.

Yet despite my frustrations, I never stopped caring about Queenie. Part of that comes down to Carty-Williams’ talent as a writer. She continues to create rich, believable relationships filled with humor, warmth, and emotional complexity. Queenie’s family remains one of the highlights of the novel, and her friendships feel authentic even when they are strained. The dialogue sparkles, the emotional stakes remain high, and Queenie herself is still compelling enough to keep readers invested. I just wanted more growth.

The first novel ended with the promise of transformation. This sequel often feels like watching someone circle the same issues repeatedly while convincing themselves they’re moving forward. Queenie does eventually begin to regain her footing, and the ending offers hope for her future, but I never experienced the same sense of hard-earned progress that made Queenie so satisfying.

Instead, I came away with the uncomfortable suspicion that some of Queenie’s worst habits may not be obstacles she will eventually overcome. They may simply be part of who she is. That doesn’t make Queenie Is Working on It a bad novel. In many ways, it’s an honest one. Real growth is rarely linear, and people often repeat old patterns even when they know better. Carty-Williams deserves credit for refusing to turn Queenie into a perfectly healed version of herself.

Still, while I appreciated the realism, I didn’t enjoy this journey nearly as much as I enjoyed the first book. I still love Queenie. I still want her to succeed. I just found myself with far less patience for her this time around.

Queenie Is Working on It reunites readers with one of contemporary fiction’s most memorable protagonists and offers a realistic exploration of what happens after the initial work of healing begins. While Candice Carty-Williams continues to excel at creating vibrant relationships and emotionally resonant moments, Queenie’s repeated self-sabotage becomes increasingly difficult to tolerate. Readers who loved Queenie will likely be eager to catch up with her, but they may also find themselves sharing the frustration of the people who love her most.

Have you read Queenie or are you planning to pick up Queenie Is Working on It? Do you have more patience for Queenie’s mistakes than I did? Let me know in the comments below.

An advance reader copy of this book (ARC) was provided to me by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Related Content

• How Candice Carty-Williams uses Black British English to tell Caribbean stories (Frieze)
• People Person exclusive: Candice Carty-Williams reveals why she wanted to write about family and how therapy has impacted her writing post-Queenie (Stylist)
• Candice Carty-Williams wants you to know that she’s NOT Queenie, thank you very much (Country & Townhouse)
• This is Candice Carty-Williams’ World. We’re all just living in it. (Trench)

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