Beautiful cover.

I'll preface this by saying that the marketing is weird. The book is compared to Bridget Jones, and yes, the main character is realistically flawed but it was not a cute contemporary story. It was not funny, at all. This is a book about Queenie, a black woman, making bad decisions that lead her to being so so badly treated by white men mainly through sex. This is about trauma and a woman who's mental health is completely deteriorating.

Queenie's character development was definitely the best thing coming out of it. At first, she appeared to me as a character lacking personality and she was frustrating by making so many mistakes. She said she was the funniest person she knew and no she was not. She didn't seem to have a genuine relationship with her friends. Said friends, although they did warn Queenie of her bad decisions, they didn't exactly go out of their way to protect her or call her out (except for Cassandra but in a harsh way). Yes, Queenie's a grown woman but if you see your friend being such a self-destructive mess, maybe you should do something?
Anyways, by the time I reached half of the book, I realised that Queenie lacking personality wasn't due to bad writing, it's just that she was completely lost. She was losing herself, had very low self-esteem and didn't believe she deserved love. And honestly her story is actually quite relatable. It's quite easy to judge her but really, she had unresolved trauma, not that helpful friends (imo), and other issues. You end up rooting for Queenie because you want her to get help.
Although the first part of the book wasn't much focusing on Queenie's interest to study and cover the Black Lives Matter movement in the UK, she tried to work on it several times throughout the book (her annoying boss just wouldn't let her and that was frustrating). She remembered why she wanted that job in the first place and how important it is to focus on something you are passionate about. Obviously, as a white woman, I cannot speak on the representation of a black woman nor on her struggles.
The last part was the most interesting for me and I wish the author would have spent more time developing Queenie's journey to get better, more scenes where she went to therapy. It felt a bit rushed and kind of like trauma-dumping (which can happen when you have so much issues and you finally go see a therapist years later).

I appreciated the author's writing but thought there was perhaps a lot of dialogue, compared to less of a deep dive in Queenie's thoughts (process)? But again, I felt that mostly during the first part.
Now, I read a French translated edition. To the French editor(s), do a better job!! By the third of the book, it felt like you were sick of it and just didn't work enough on it: words were missing, others were repeated, some sentences didn't make sense? Why do books written by marginalised authors and/or with marginalised characters keep being sabotaged like that by the French publishing industry...