No Tears for the Cherished is the heart-wrenching story of Dr. Nyaboke Nduati’s small town childhood in Eastern Africa. Surrounded, and silenced, by devastating domestic abuse, family dysfunction and illness, witchcraft, patriarchal oppression, physical and sexual abuse, female circumcision, and the early deaths of both of her parents, she protected herself by going into survival mode; a state of numbness that was her shield against the realities of her troubled life. Through a deeply and vividly honest letter to her dead mother, Dr. Nyaboke Nduati explores the events of her life before and after becoming an AIDS orphan. Her experiences of a childhood in distress, and a teenagehood of trying to put the pieces of her life back together, are all too relatable. She writes boldly, yet delicately, about the realities of an orphaned childhood, when no one comes to the rescue.