Completing a trilogy about contemporary Black life, which includes The Friends … and Ruby, [Edith Jackson] explores the experiences of Phyllisia's poverty-stricken friend Edith Jackson. In a first-person account, occasionally colloquial and only infrequently coarse, the seventeen-year-old orphan tells of her efforts to keep her young sisters—Bessie, Suzy, and Minnie—together as a family…. The novel, written in a naturalistic vein, is powerful in its depiction of character and creates scenes memorable for their psychological truth; and so well integrated are theme, character, and situation that they redeem whatever is superficially sordid in the story.