The confusion and disagreement regarding sex roles is not just an adult problem that youth does not have to think about. On the contrary, it is probably more important to them than to most adults whose lifestyles and obligations are already so established that all they can comfortably do is play the game out to its conclusion. In light of this, the best of the current writers are presenting honest portrayals of all kinds of relationships and roles and then hoping that young readers can observe and make choices that will best fit their own personalities and needs.

Rosa Guy's trilogy, The Friends, Ruby, and Edith Jackson, exemplifies one of these alternative explorations that would not have been presented to young readers a generation ago. The first book in the group treats an unlikely but believable friendship between Phyllisia and Edith who are both rejects in the social structure of their Harlem neighborhood…. One unusual thing about the book is that it treats the friendship of two girls with the same kind of serious respect with which boys' friendships have traditionally been written about. In most earlier books, girls' friendships always broke up as soon as boys appeared on the scene.

The second book in Guy's trilogy, Ruby, focuses on Phyllisia's sister who is two years older than Edith and Phyll. It includes the story of a lesbian relationship between Ruby and a beautiful classmate…. In Edith Jackson, the protagonist is looking forward to her eighteenth birthday when she hopes to be free of foster homes and The Institution so that she can try again to set up a home for her sisters. But, by the end of the book, the girls are scattered, and Edith realizes that it is her own life she must plan. She has had a brief love affair with a handsome Harlem playboy almost twice her age and is excited at finding herself pregnant. But in the end of the book, she has decided that the mature thing to do is to have an abortion.

A difficulty inherent in the problem novel is that it looks at life from a basically negative stance and in many ways presents an unbalanced set of options. For example, critics ask, how can young readers get insights into the kinds of men and women they want to be and into preparing for marriage and family life when most of the parents in these books are so unsuccessful? The lack of positive role models, particularly adult males and females in family roles, is definitely a problem with the new realism. Writers have presented a much wider range of successful role models who are themselves young adults. (pp. 195-96)