Good Morning Means I Love You

Review Quotes:

"I've been saying it and saying it: Kendra Allen is a generational talent, and Good Morning Means I Love You proves me right again. Absolutely exquisite!" - Jason Reynolds, New York Times bestselling author of Look Both Ways and Long Way Down

"Good Morning Means I Love You does something extraordinary: It disassembles then reimagines what it means to be an advocate for oneself and loved ones, laying bare the dirty work that is building a life with one another. Allen's writing is a gut check; her characters bump their heads and are wisest when they are vulnerable, and then at their most tender, reveal to us what holds us back the most." - Tyriek White, author of We Are a Haunting ​​​​​​​

The electrifying and intimate first novel from the author of The Collection Plate and Fruit Punch, a searing story of a young Texan woman and the family she makes with two men

"A couple years after Noon and I fall in love, we fall in love with Micah--and a couple years after that, I have both of their babies. We choose, this land and this life. We share, ourselves and our sons. We name them, Morning and Night."

In her arresting first novel, Kendra Allen investigates love, partnership, motherhood, pleasure and the pursuit of freedom in one young woman's defiantly unconventional terms. Rae has just returned to her family after leaving for a stretch and suddenly - that family being her two male partners and the sons, named Morning and Night, that she has mothered with each of them. In the span of one year, they will experience unfathomable depths of devastation--and joys they could never predict.

Good Morning Means I Love You follows Rae as she makes choices around sex, mothering, and partnership that are as stunning to everyone else as they are natural to herself. With pain and pleasure, she watches as her children learn to walk and give language to the world as her lovers contend with their own ideas of masculinity, personhood, and fatherhood. Along the way, Rae begins to understand the hardest and most beautiful truth: that we have only so much time on earth to make love, to make family, and to make good on the promise of this one, short life.

This is a novel of the self in all its simultaneities and a living portrait of intimacy written in poetic, bold, and sensual prose that shines a light on what it means to redefine expectation.

Review Citations:

• Publishers Weekly 05/18/2026 (EAN 9780063388413, Hardcover) - *Starred Review

Contributor Bio:Allen, Kendra

Kendra Allen is the author of the memoir Fruit Punch, the poetry collection The Collection Plate, and the essay collection When You Learn the Alphabet, which won the 2018 Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction, awarded by Kiese Laymon. She writes to music column "Make Love in My Car" for Southwest Review. She was born and raised in Dallas.