Jayne Allen Books In Order

Publication Order of Black Girls Must Die Exhausted Books

Jayne Allen is an American author out of Detroit. She made her debut as an author in 2018 with the release of Black Girls Must Die Exhausted.

The author is originally from the state of Michigan where she lived in the city of Detroit. She considers herself to be a serial entrepreneur. She is Harvard-educated attorney and an engineer.

Allen writes her fiction based off of life experiences and she has said that she considers her characters to be fragments of reality that are strung together by imagination. Her stories are designed to stick to your bones. She made her debut with the Girls Must Die Exhausted series which touches upon many contemporary women’s issues, including race, fertility, mental health awareness, workplace womanhood, and modern relationships. She has said that the series is “chocolate chick lit with a conscience.”

The writing of Jayne Allen is meant to echo the desire that the author has to bring both multiculturalism and multidimensionality to contemporary women’s fiction. Her protagonists are designed to be dynamic while also being black. She has a passion for increasing diversity in book publishing and hopes to use the work that she does to help others move past any bias they may have in the name of growth, connection, and innovation.

In addition to her work writing the Black Girls Must Die Exhausted series, Allen has also written multiple non-fiction books. She also is the founder of a full-service online book marketing and author branding course known as Book Genius. Whenever Jayne is not writing or working on her newsletter, she enjoys spending time with friends and family. She also finds time to dabble in standup comedy and does her best to try one new thing each week.

The title Black Girls Must Die Exhausted came to her way back in 2016 at a time when there were a lot of sad stories about loss of life in the news. The losses weighed heavily on her spirit as a Black woman and gave her the desire to protect everyone, but not knowing how to do that. The word exhausted kept coming up for her and in conversations with other Black women. The word basically told its own story and she decided that it would be best to take that word on its own journey in her writing. The book acknowledges the feeling of being exhausted, but also celebrates the ways in which exhausted Black women are able to find joy and love in spite of it.

Jayne set out to unpack some of the layers of the human experience through Tabby’s story in Black Girls Must Die Exhausted. She had set out to write contemporary fiction with a Black female protagonist and wanted to tell a story involving a transformation that a person can go through that would be best told with a Black woman as the one going through it. The author has said that for a Black woman it takes a lot of energy to live outside of their authenticity and there is a weight that builds up over time because of that. The novel sets out to show the multiple ways in which this can affect a person and how they can tackle the journey of finding the courage within themselves to live more authentically.

Her biggest desire when writing was to craft an entertaining and engaging story. She found it challenging in her writing to layer in the complexities of modern life without things becoming too heavy. There are many issues that are cared around by people every day and a lot of them go unacknowledged, but the author hoped that through her writing that other people could see what Tabby was going through and it could help them feel validated and less alone.

Black Girl Must Die Exhausted is the first book in the series of the same name. The book follows Tabitha Walker, a black woman who has put a plan in place to have it all. She is thirty-three years old and has a checklist set up in order to bring her the life of her dreams. She’s already gotten the education, the good job, the down payment on a nice house, and is dating marriage material. She works as a local news reporter, has the perfect boyfriend, and a standing appointment with a hairstylist. Everything seems to be going according to plan until Tabby receives an unexpected diagnosis. Now, Tabby finds her perfect life crashing down all around her and the idea of having children is now in jeopardy. Her checklist is in jeopardy and now she is being faced with an impossible choice where she must choose between her career, her dream home, and a family of her own.

Tabby will get help from her best friends, Laila and Alexis, as well as her grandmother who adds some much needed generational wisdom to the equation and the nonagenarian firebrand Ms. Gretchen. Tabby will explore just how far the reaches of modern medicine can take her and tests the limits of her relationships. She holds out hole of salvaging the future she always dreamed of, but that fight will take over all in her life. It will demand a steep price that forces an honest reckoning from everyone she holds dear. Her grandmother’s old adage of Black girls must die exhausted just might end up being true for her.

Black Girls Must Be Magic is the second book in the series. The book picks up after the events of the first book and Tabby is even more worn out than before. She is quite busy when her boss at the news station starts getting complaints about her natural hair. The situation at work threatens her livelihood as well as her identity and she’ll have to make some tough decisions about her future. On top of that, Marc has made his way back into her world with some surprising demands. Tabby will need to find the bravery, strength, and self-love to figure it all out.