📚 The Book Review
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (5/5 stars)
Don’t Cry for Me by Dr. Daniel Black
Reviewed by Carlos Grooms, MLS
Dr. Daniel Black’s Don’t Cry for Me is a quiet storm of a novel—intimate, poetic, and profoundly emotional. Structured as a letter from a dying father to his estranged gay son, the novel unfolds as a reckoning with a lifetime of regret, inherited trauma, and unspoken love. The father, hardened by a challenging past and limited by the emotional repression handed down by generations of Black men, seeks in his final days to explain and atone.
This book is less about resolution and more about recognition—the painful realization that silence, judgment, and misunderstanding have fractured a relationship that might never fully heal. Yet there is grace in the attempt. Dr. Black’s lyrical prose allows the reader to sit with the complexities of love, masculinity, and the emotional cost of survival in a society that often demands Black men to remain closed and unfeeling.
A professor of African American Literature at Clark Atlanta University, Dr. Black is a critically acclaimed and award-winning writer whose previous works (The Coming, Perfect Peace, Black on Black, The Sacred Place) have cemented his status as a vital voice in contemporary Black literature. Don’t Cry for Me has been recognized with the 2025 NBCC Terrie M. Williams Inspiration Award and nominated for the Townsend Prize for Fiction, the Ernest J. Gaines Award, and the Georgia Author of the Year Award.
Black’s use of the epistolary form offers an unfiltered window into grief and memory, weaving personal trauma into a broader commentary on generational wounds and the longing for redemption. Readers will find this book both heartbreaking and healing—a narrative that speaks to the emotional interiority of Black men and the universal need for forgiveness.
Don’t Cry for Me is essential reading for anyone invested in the intersections of identity, healing, and Black fatherhood. It’s a novel that lingers, quietly urging us to listen, to speak, and to forgive—before it’s too late.
