A review by podanotherjessi
Why Fathers Cry at Night: A Memoir in Love Poems, Recipes, Letters, and Remembrances by Kwame Alexander

funny reflective slow-paced

I like a lot of this book in isolation, but as a whole I'm a little confused about the overall picture. The framing is that it's a letter to his daughters. But then Alexander gets into some weird territory like describing sexual encounters he's had, which feels like it doesn't fit the framing. At the end, he really reframes the whole collection as about not just his daughters, but all of the women in his life; his mother, his ex-wives. I wish the book had been organized more along those lines, with parts for each of those women.
But as I said at the start, much of this book was really good. I loved a lot of the poems and the recipes were really fun. It just didn't all come together to be more than a sum of its parts.