The Girls in Queens by Christine Kandic Torres
Review of The Girls in Queens by Christine Kandic Torres
“‘Imagine if Queens was just filled with girls. Wouldn’t it be so much more…peaceful?’”
The Girls in Queens by Christine Kandic Torres (2022). Published by HarperVia US.
There is something so special to me reading books set in New York City by and about native New Yorkers.
Sure, there are so many great novels about transplants from the Midwests working in restaurants or publishing, but as a Atlantic Coast transplant who used to live in New York, I loved native New Yorkers.
They have a lot of grit and tenacity to them, especially all my friends who were born into immigrant families and were the first of their families to go to school and pursue higher education and whatnot. I love a good New York story and the heart and devotion people have towards it.
That’s what led me to pick up The Girls in Queens. Queens is my favorite borough, and if I ever moved back (unlikely, because I hate the thought of becoming the reason for a gentrifying neighborhood) it would the exact neighborhoods the protagonist finds herself wandering through on a daily basis. This novel takes place over the course of a decade, putting it through certain moments in New York history, such as the Twin Towers being attacked, as well as baseball games with the Mets.
I read through the entire novel in the course of two days. It wasn’t a novel that I wanted to get through quickly; I wanted to savor in the relationship and world it created with its characters. I think that’s the proper approach for a novel like this.
Let’s begin the review.
Two best friends find their relationship falling apart over a boy.
The Girl in Queens is told from the perspective of Brisma, a Latina who grew up in the deep part of Queens with her best friend Kelly. Each chapter alternates between time periods over the span of a decade.
In 1996, when the two of them were attending Catholic school and chasing after boys, we learn the basics and whos of this story. Brisma and Kelly are the two best friends who will probably stick together even through the embarrassing moment, such as when they were on a ferris wheel and spotted Kelly’s crush opening her love letter with the other white boys. We discover the Filipino character who used to hang out with the white boys, as well as Brian, a Latino boy who becomes Brisma’s boyfriend later in high school.
Early on it’s revealed that Brisma and Brian broke up in high school and never really spoke again, up until they end up at the same Mets game one night. His friend, the Filipino guy, had come back from the Army and is in town, and Brian starts to get a little cozy with Brisma again.
She returns his affections, but the plot gets thicker. We learn that Kelly and Brian cheated with each other and Brisma walked in on them, and Brian’s friend, in the current moment, keeps warning her to stay away from Brian. The first portion of the novel is this dance back and forth between past and present, weaving together the threads of context for the moments unfolding on the page.
Brisma is a student at Hunter College and a gifted writer; she’s applying for a fellowship that might take her out of New York and into Los Angeles for months. On the opposite end, Kelly, who is the daughter of a convict, is waitressing and going to community college part-time. She can’t afford tuition on her own without the constant hustling. Brian, on the other hand, has had it much easier.
He has a full baseball scholarship to St. John’s University in Queens, but that becomes threatened when one night he calls Brisma and tells her has been accused of sexual assault.
This is where the novel really begins to pick up in pace. Brisma believes him, and so does Kelly, but while throwing a fundraiser to raise money for his lawyer fees, she’s told that Brian has done this to other girls and also recorded having sex with Brisma as a girl.
The one friend he has finds the tapes in his older brother’s belongings, gives it to Brisma, and Kelly doesn’t believe her when she calls him out. Kelly drops her, and Brisma decides to write an op-ed for the paper after talking to the girl Brian assaulted. This furthers the divide between them, despite Brisma getting a ton of support and emails from other girls who told her Brian did the same things to them.
The Girls in Queens has the potential to be a heartwarming story, but, as things tend to go, men get in between a beautiful friendship between two women.
The last portion of this novel is really heavy and dark, and could easily be triggering for those who have experienced similar actions as to what Brian did to girls. It’s empowering to see Brisma decide to write the op-ed and figure out how she can use her story for good, despite the fact she is burning some bridges in the process of doing so. When she heads off to Los Angeles, there’s a lot of hope for her and what she might continue to do in her future.
The one thing this novel is very good at is world building. These characters, whether they’re at a bar or a baseball game, feel like they were made with so much thought and care.
I felt like I knew who each of them were and could map out their emotional and physical journeys throughout the novel. It felt like New York during the 2000s and nineties, capturing the mood and vibes of the time through the selection of images scattered throughout the novel. And, perhaps, what I mean to say is this: is feels like a lived experience as a whole.
Overall Thoughts
I genuinely enjoyed this novel! I think there were some faults: the pacing is really off. The first three-fourths of the novel move really slowly and kind of serve as a background guide of sorts to establish the characters and really fall into the rhythm of their dynamics with each other.
In a way, this works because the final arc of the novel is so dramatic, harsh, and tense that it kind of needs this to balance it out.
However, because the last arc with the sexual assault and Brisma deciding to have agency over what happened to her comes so suddenly, it feels slightly unresolved.
We understand that Kelly was just a jealous girl trying to pretend she had a new best friend in front of Brisma, but I don’t see a point of return for the two of them like the novel kind of suggests. I understand how hard it is for Brisma to cut off someone like that, but if Kelly doesn’t open her eyes, she’ll be headed down a destructive path, too.
I think all of this is to say that you get attached to these characters. They feel like real people who would exist in these spaces—that’s why you read novels like these. Pick this one up if it sounds of interest to you.
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