This was a beautifully written book that was deeply emotional. Jacob is dying from cancer and in his last days he is writing a letter to his to gay son. These letters attempt to explain the differences in their generations and Jacob's misguided views that caused the division between father and son. This book handles a lot of difficult topics. Overall, this was a very moving novel that I would highly recommend.

I would like to thank Hanover Square Press for providing me with a copy.

An emotional family history, and an apology, in letters. Jacob has never been able to communicate effectively with his son Isaac. Isaac for his part always felt the weight of his father's inability to understand that he is gay. Now, though, Jacob is dying of cancer and uses these letters to tell Isaac the story of their family, of the generations that went before. Novels with dying characters looking back over their lives have become common in recent years. This is distinguished by the anguish and urgency Jacob feels. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. It's thoughtful and thought provoking.

Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to read an ARC of Don't Cry for Me!

This book is so incredibly moving and beautiful! The story is told in a series of letters from a dying Black father to his estranged gay son, sharing his history and doing his best to profess his love in his last moments. The writing style is truly amazing, and I really loved the way that the author explored the themes of manhood and family relationships. While there are many moments of heartbreak throughout the story, there are also many moments of hope, and all the emotions feel extremely real and immediate. The story is incredibly captivating, and I read the whole thing in one sitting.

Highly recommend!

This was a beautiful, poignant, and heartbreaking book that I’m certain will be on many Best Of 2022 lists. The book may be in epistolary form, but we are still able to fully grasp Jacob’s pain and yearning as he shares his stories. Jacob writes about not only himself but his family history as well-a history tarnished by the trauma of slavery and segregation.
The author wrote this novel wishing his own father would have been like Jacob, and this fact adds even more beautiful depth to the story.

On a quest to express his sorrow for his misguided beliefs and behavior and also to profess his love to his gay son, a dying father writes of his own history and that of his family. The descriptions of the personalities of parents and grandparents were so eerily familiar to me and really brought home how we are products of our environment. The author wrote this novel wishing his own father would have been the father in this story so it is very insightful and moving. Many will see themselves and may come away with a deeper understanding of their parents and find a small measure of peace. This a remarkable novel.

Thanks to NetGalley and Hanover Square Press for the ARC to read and review.

A really and truly excellent epistolary novel about a Black man on his deathbed, writing to his estranged gay son.

Jacob, the narrator, describes his life, his love, his family history, and contemplates the nature of manhood and love and the gaps between generations in a story that is frequently heartwrenching and upsetting.

I really loved the author's writing style, and I think people will be talking about this book all year.

From the publisher: A Black father makes amends with his gay son through letters written on his deathbed in this wise and penetrating novel of empathy and forgiveness, for fans of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robert Jones Jr. and Alice Walker.

Don’t Cry for Me is a sad, slow story told in a series of letters written by a man who is dying to his son. The history covered in the letters is very believable. The father insists that his son understand the family’s past, and visit the family land. He acknowledges how slavery has damaged them, and how Black people have learned to despise themselves instead of those who enslaved them. He tries to explain how expectations were different for straight adult men in the past, how he loved his son’s mother but why he was not a good father or husband. How he knows their broken relationship is his fault. How he wanted to say I love you out loud.

The author says, “When, in 2013, my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, I knew what it meant – he’d soon forget what he’d done or said to me over the years. …For a long time, I had wanted us to hash things out, to speak honestly about how we had hurt or disappointed one another over the years. But Daddy’s mind left like a dream at dawn. And now the encounter could only happen in my imagination. So that was where I went. I saw, in my mind, my father leaning over a legal pad, writing, as best he could, something very private, very painful that couldn’t wait another day. …I wondered what he’d say if he could stare into my heart. This book is his response, his desperate plea.” It’s more accurate to say the book is the son’s desperate plea, to believe his father loved him as he was. It’s clear the text of the letters is wish fulfillment. I didn’t believe a man as presented would say the things he writes in his letters to his son. There is a small bit of magical realism that also didn’t work for me, and I thought the novel would have been stronger without it.

Although I had trouble believing the sentiments expressed by the father, they were sad and moving. Much of the writing is lovely and lyrical. But overall the book made me think of the famous last line from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

I read an advance reader copy of Don’t Cry for Me from Netgalley. Although I felt this book was flawed, it is definitely worth a read, and others may find some comfort in the words. It is scheduled to be published on February 1, and the Galesburg Public Library will own it in print and audio.

Really interesting premise. I stopped after 10%, as the format of the book just wasn't for me. Solid four stars for the right reader if it continues as it has.

Thank you to NetGalley and Harlequin for the ARC.

2.5 stars, rounded up.

There were these moments in the book that i loved it, these glimmers of things really becoming fleshed out. But overall having this be fully one-sided epistolary felt unsatisfying to me, though it was clearly a purposeful decision. Even an epilogue might have really changed my read of it. But as it was, there was something so incomplete feeling. Also, i couldn't understand why it was all set in 2003? That felt like a choice that wasn't really made relevant.

In a series of letters detailing his upbringing and life, Jacob, the dying father of a gay black man seeks forgiveness from his alienated son, Isaac for being unable to express love and have a close relationship with him. By revealing deeply held secrets from his childhood and difficult life experiences, he hopes to explain his cruel behavior as a father and a husband. In addition Jacob tells Isaac how reading has given him both compassion for others and a better understanding of himself. With an authentic account, Daniel Black draws readers into his tragic, haunting and emotional novel.

In this book, the author presents the growth of a father, who is not many generations removed from slavery, in regards to his gay son. It is presented in a series of letters as he is putting off death. It is beautifully written with many inspirational points. While it may be heart-wrenching with some difficult-to-read material, I think it is a must-read for 2022. One of my favorite things about the whole book is how the dad started reading more and how it lead him to greater understanding and empathy. I wish this upon all people in our divided world.

Heartbreaking, raw, beautiful. Don't Cry for Me is an absolute masterpiece, a must read. This one will stay with me for a long time. HIGHLY recommend!

A Black gay man imagines family histories and confessions from his dying father in an epistolary novel that excavates the generational meanings of Blackness, masculinity, fatherhood, and more. Insightful and emotionally moving, Don’t Cry for Me is a story that is immensely accessible and powerfully healing for scores of readers who have struggled with the pain of parental rejection.

In his final days of dying from cancer, Jacob, a sixty-something man bequeaths to his son Isaac a series of letters to express the many things he never had the courage or the ability to say face-to-face. Born in the 1940s in rural Arkansas, Jacob recounts his memories coming into the world in a family that was only a few generations removed from slavery and shaped by scarcity, segregation, and the psychic damage of human subjugation. Due to tragic circumstances that are gradually revealed, Jacob was raised by his grandfather, who worked a farm year-round, seven days a week.

Boys like Jacob attended school when they were not needed to help with farming, thus education was a luxury. Most of what Jacob learned about living in the world came from his grandparents, neighbors, and other boys his age. The prerogative was survival. There was no time for notions that children needed emotional nurturance or that anyone had a right to personal fulfillment. Such conditions produced hardened people. Jacob’s grandfather only took a half day off from work for his wife’s funeral, for example. Now an older man, Jacob is circumspect about the environment in which he was raised, but he was inevitably a product of the times for Black people, and fathers of that era generally.

Jacob’s “voice” makes his storytelling unexpectedly compelling and sympathetic. Even when he confesses participating in a horrific act of violence against an effeminate boy at his school, one cannot help seeing events from his perspective and feeling his shame and horror. Black men of his generation were taught to be strong, decisive, and unemotional, and however harshly they treated “weaker” men, it was meant to correct a deficit and bring them back to their essential nature. His story illuminates that deeply imbedded role in Black communities where gender transgressions hit men personally, threatening their place in a world that has stripped away their power. As Jacob writes to his son, he couldn’t understand why a man would want to give up his manhood when so much has already been taken away from them.

Later, when Jacob married Isaac’s mother and Isaac came along, Jacob wanted more than anything to be a good father. He used what tools he knew, setting paychecks aside to give his son more than he’d been given, encouraging his education and taking him to baseball games. But he was unequipped to provide gentleness and love, particularly as Isaac’s gayness became evident.

Through his letters, Jacob ponders many issues, from race relations, feminism, the Black Power movement, and the disintegration of Black communities through flight to urban areas. It’s a coherent narrative however, as all these things figure in to his central aim: to explain to his now estranged adult son that he loves him and he deeply regrets that he couldn’t be the father Isaac needed. Isaac appears in the story through Jacob’s eyes, and through that, he’s well-developed. From a young age, he was a sensitive boy, clinging to his mother and with interests in music and arts. As he grew, he became moody and brooding, and he rejected his father’s attempts to spend time with him.

Jacob lays bare the injuries he inflicted on his son, destroying his action figures when Isaac used them to act out love stories, walking out of Isaac’s school theater performances, and striking his son when Isaac turned to his parents for understanding of his gayness. It’s a familiar story for gay men of Isaac’s generation, and like many, he left his hometown at the earliest opportunity to distance himself from the traumas of his childhood. His relationship with his father was permanently broken.

Yet, Jacob’s struggle to understand his son is a heartbreaking story of its own, and in that, Don’t Cry for Me offers a powerful lesson in redemption and reconciliation. The mistakes he made are his to bear, now dying alone after a life spent trying to be the man he thought he was supposed to be. While necessarily tragic, Black has written a novel that will resonate for countless readers and activate our better instincts to forgive.

Reviewed for Out in Print.

Jacob and Isaac don’t have a good relationship. Jacob was raised by a strict father that grew up in slavery and thinks that’s how he needs to raise his son, because good men work hard and support their families. But how can he explain things to his son when his son is gay, and he doesn’t understand how men could not want a woman. Now Jacob is dying, and he wishes things could have been different between him and his son. He’s realized that he could have done a few things differently, and that there were things he should have told his son, so he decides that he can explain things in a letter before he dies. In this letter we see the thought process of Jacob, and how our views can change as we age and realize that things may not be as bad as we think when it comes to how our children decide to live their lives.

The past is never as far removed as we think it is. Inspired by his own past with his dying father, Daniel Black uses this novel to show how the pain from the past continues to trickle in and invade the present. This novel takes the form of a last letter from a father, regretful over his disappointment in gay son, trying to explain how he could still love his son, but he didn't know how. It's a painful read--but a necessary one.

An intergenerational journey of storytelling to get to the heart of the matter. It’s back story of why some father and son, male to male relationships can be so complex as they’re burdened with the secrets of personal history and shame.

What an absolutely important book this is! LGBTQ+ representation among blacks is so needed... and the poignancy of watching this Black father come to terms with his relationship with his gay son, and acknowledging how a history of slavery affected Black parenting is new and needed. I was honored to join this man on his journey.

A wonderful book covering generations of an African American family, the hopes , hurts, and reconciliations. Very well written , highly recommended for all

This book is a chronicle of Jacob's life beginning shortly after slavery was abolished. We learn about many of the difficulties a black family faces in that time period. The story goes through Jacob's life as he loses a younger brother, marries and divorces Rachel, has a son who is gay, and as he prepares to die. The story is written as a letter to his son, Isaac as he shares the story of his life, the bad choices he has made, and the changes he sees with society. It is a sobering story about the struggles a black man faced. I would recommend this to high school students or adults.

Thank you @netgallery for allowing to read this!
This book approval came at the perfect time, it's like someone at netgallery was spying on me and new that it's only recently that my father has begun to share his traumas with us. For 23 years he never gave space to himself to voice those out and this book felt reminiscent of that day my sister and I were with him sobbing at the heartbreaking moments of his existence.
Definitely moved by and sobbed at this one. Reading letters from the perspective of a father to his son was refreshing.