Like all award winners, Emily Cheney Neville will spend the rest of her life competing with herself. Her "It's Like This, Cat" walked (or talked) off with the Newbery Medal several years ago. Is "The Seventeenth-Street Gang" a match for that champion? The answer must be a reluctant no.

Mrs. Neville's eye for the nuances of affection and exasperation between parents and children is still keen, and she creates believable characters, who talk and act like real children and adults. Everyone's favorite in this book is sure to be Minnow, Seventeenth Street's supercharged femme fatale…. But Minnow's charm is wasted on a very routine plot—the gang's hesitation about taking a new boy named Hollis into the group—and Mrs. Neville must resort to even more routine melodrama to resolve it. (pp. 42, 44)