Black Girls Must Die Exhausted — A Black Girl’s Review

Writing a review for this book exhausted me, so I can relate to the book title. I was exhausted because I wanted to relate to the experiences in this book without making it look or sound all bad. There were good times but there were also times I wondered why there were different rules for girls and a different set for boys.

Growing up and listening to the adults, I wondered why the emphasis was on girls not walking alone at night or not doing certain things instead of strict condemnation for abuse and rape.

I wondered why we as black girls not only had to do ten times more than the white girls but also had to do 10 times more than the black man to prove ourselves worthy.

I wondered why the woman was valued on how much abuse she could tolerate from a man or whether she had a man at all. I also wondered about the pressure of you settling for less because you are ‘running out of time’ and the pressure of ‘when am I seeing my grandkids’ or the ‘is this how you would behave in your husband’s house’ coming from our mothers.

Somehow when these people gave advice and said ‘married couples weren’t raised the same way’, they were most likely talking in defense of the man and not their black daughters. But I always console myself by asking what I could expect from a society that frowns on girls having sex outside marriage but allows the boys to without wondering who the boys were having sex with.

While I didn’t get some of these pressures, we can’t say the same for Tabitha, the heroine of this book. Not only is she getting this pressure from her mother, but her doctor has also just given her six months to either get pregnant, freeze her eggs or forget about having biological children.

Her family urges her to settle down with Marc but when she tells him the news, he panics and breaks up with her.

She picks her broken heart up and focuses on her work but can she really focus when even at work, she is reminded that a man will get the position whether he worked for it or not while she has to work harder and yet be told she didn’t do enough.

I, however, love that the book doesn’t just focus on girls but it also talks about violence against blacks and we see it through the eyes of Tabitha who is a reporter, and her grandmother, a white woman who ended up with a mixed-race child she couldn’t make the world love just because his skin color was different.

The book reiterates that people come into relationships and marriages with all sorts of baggage and decide whether they will fix it for you or not. It also shows how they might not be willing to fix their issues for you but fix it for the next person.

I love how the author spins the end and Tabitha and Marc end up together. Though I agree with Miss Gretchen that a man who can’t see you in his long-term plans isn’t your man.

Hear me out, before the doctor’s news, they had been together for 18 months, and yet he didn’t want a family with her or kids. I am not saying that it’s wrong but these are people in their thirties so you know every woman at that age either wants to settle down or not so it might be beneficial if you guys had that conversation upfront.

Jayne Allen highlights the trials that are the black girls’ experiences, police brutality, family support, men’s insecurities, and the importance of dealing with trauma and healing from it.

This is certainly a must-read for all black girls who don’t want to die exhausted and I hope this book makes you feel seen while reminding you that you aren’t alone as it reminded me.