If Such a Fun Age hooked you with performative allyship gone sideways, meet Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams—another brilliantly messy reckoning.

If you loved watching Emira navigate the absurdity of white liberal guilt with Reid's razor-sharp eye, Queenie hands you another young Black woman adrift in spaces that promise inclusion but deliver microaggressions instead. Carty-Williams deploys the same conversational, no-bullshit voice—think texts from your most brutally honest friend—while tracking a protagonist whose messy life choices and identity crisis feel like holding up a mirror to millennial exhaustion, only with more cringeworthy dates and workplace hypocrisy.

Where Such a Fun Age gave you trainwreck good intentions, Queenie doubles down on the squirm factor: performative allyship, cultural clashes at every turn, and the kind of humor that makes you laugh and wince simultaneously while scrolling through someone's DMs.

This is what happens when satire stops being polite and starts getting painfully, hilariously real.