Author Jayne Allen takes us on a fun and realistic journey through the life of Tabitha Walker, a “Black lady with a plan to have it all” in her early thirties who lives in Los Angeles. Allen exposes us to Tabitha’s girlfriends, boyfriend, family, and working ecology, which is centered on her career and life’s pleasures, such as drunken brunches. The core conflict is wrapped up in news Tabitha receives about her waning fertility, which drives her to reevaluate life, love, and her timeline for getting everything she wants out of life.
This novel does an engaging job of blending page-turning scenes, character development, and affection while offering a nuanced perspective of a 30-something, unmarried Black woman struggling with her fertility challenges. Not only how she processed and made decisions about the news internally, but also how she shared it with her mother, two excellent girlfriends, one married and the other extremely single, and the man she is dating. The discovery shatters her relationship with her lover, and based on how he reacts to the announcement, there is no Cinderella ending in sight.
One of the most touching aspects of the tale is Tabitha’s close relationship with her grandmother, a white woman, who begins to divulge her history and background of dating interracially at a time when it was frowned upon. Tabitha is her grandmother’s name, and the two of them are so close that she sees her often and chats to her about everything in her life, including her personal relationships. They also talk about racial dynamics, which reveals the novel’s title’s premise. I found myself wishing I had shared a similar bond with one of my grandmothers, both of whom have since passed away.
When I first received this book, the title piqued my interest, and I assumed it would be a tale about Black girls’ ongoing challenges in life and how exhaustion can result. That is, without a doubt, in the novel. However, it also depicts a different side of exuberant tiredness from living a full life, of leaving nothing on the table and riding the waves of life till the wheels fall off. This novel reminded me of the happy exhaustion we all seek towards the end of our life’s journey while I was staying in the Catalina highlands in Tucson, Arizona.
