Each of the fourteen short stories in [Street Games] deals with the lives of the people living on a block in Brooklyn…. Even the shortest of these works conveys something of what the reader can regard as the fundamental outline of a particular life. In "Gold," a little girl simply takes a walk through her neighborhood, and one feels as if one has participated not just in her fantasies but also in the total ambience of dirt and frustration from which she dreams of escaping. In another, longer story, the main character moves between the squalid and chaotic existence of a "commune" on George Street and her parents' townhouse in Brooklyn Heights…. With sometimes brutal but consistently evocative imagery, Mrs. Brown manages to depict a particular strand in current parent-child relationships, a familiar brand of post-adolescent panic and disaffection, the violent self-pity of the girl's brilliant but aimless Puerto Rican boyfriend. Mrs. Brown's point of view is never merely spectatorial; even when the stories are told from an exterior perspective, one has a powerful sense of receiving knowledge about the complex substance of her characters' everyday experience—as they themselves perceive it. To be sure, Mrs. Brown concentrates almost unwaveringly on the stormier, more wrenching aspects of the experience of life represented, but her stories seek to enlarge rather than to diminish the people portrayed in them, and it is from this impulse of her writing that the primary seriousness and effectiveness derive.