[The Friends established Rosa Guy] as a major novelist concerned with "the grotesque in life and character." Now she has written a raw and powerful work that centers on a sixteen-year-old boy from the streets of Harlem…. The second half of the book is a shocking, suspenseful whodunit; but all of the book, transcending race and environment, is a remarkably mature exposure—as clean and penetrating as surgery—of fear and loneliness, desperation and suffering, deception and pride. (pp. 62-3)