Black girls must die exhausted A novel

Tabitha Walker is a 33-year-old news reporter who is on the cusp of having it all. She dates her dream guy, has two best friends who are always cheering her on, and is weeks away from receiving a promotion to lead reporter. But a fertility diagnosis puts a damper on her plans, and she realizes she has a short window to either conceive or go through the egg-freezing process. Shortly after, everything she's known to be secure seemingly falls apart. Weekly visits with her sounding board, her grandmother, the original Tabitha Walker whom she was named for, help Tabitha gain insight into her troubled relationship with her father, and how this relationship has impacted her perspective on love and forgiveness. As Tabitha weathers hard truths and realizations, she eventually sheds the strong Black woman trope and allows herself to feel and evolve. Allen's debut novel, the first in a trilogy originally published with a small indie press in 2018, captures the complexities of Black women coming into adulthood while learning to manage the disappointments and expectations placed on them by society.

Allen's promising debut follows a Black reporter as she navigates matters of race, womanhood, and loyalty while gunning for a promotion at the L.A. TV station where she works. After 33-year-old Tabitha Walker's father left her and her mother when Tabitha was little, she grew close to her white paternal grandmother and visited her weekly at her nursing home, dreaming of a time when she could move both of them into a house. Back in the present, Tabitha's boyfriend reveals he's not ready to marry and be a father, so Tabitha spends the money she'd been saving for a house on freezing her eggs. Meanwhile, Tabitha's oldest friend separates from her husband after he admits his infidelity, and another friend dates a married man and starts keeping secrets. As Tabitha rises at work, she emphasizes the importance of perspective in her reporting on issues that affect Black people, such as gentrification and encounters with police, and Allen smartly mirrors the theme of perspective with the story of Tabitha's personal life, as Tabitha considers how her own point of view has shaped her feelings for others. Though the writing can sometimes be clunky, with overly descriptive sentences, Allen has the chops to become a terrific storyteller. There's a lot of potential here. Agent: Lucinda Halpern, Lucinda Literary. (Aug.)