[In the following review of Roadwalkers, Bryant describes Grau's skill in evoking the narrator's viewpoint.]

Time is an indeterminate factor in this new novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Shirley Ann Grau. Roadwalkers begins with the story of Baby, a homeless and abandoned black girl whose early nomadic life struggle leaves her with a wispy memory, and forces her to approach life with stunning inventiveness. This first section of the book is appropriately and beautifully ethereal: events recalled in the language of a child who has never known a definitive context, and so creates her own. This device which initially underscores the plot becomes occasionally murky and not quite believable, however, as the novel is laid out in fits and starts. Soon after we learn about and become invested in Baby, Grau jolts us with the long history of Charles Tucker, the white plantation manager who positively changes the course of Baby's life. It is only after a lengthy detour into his past that we discover his significance to the plot, and find ourselves delivered to the thick of the novel.

Nanda, the eccentric and refreshingly confident daughter of Mary (Baby's adult name), is the best storyteller by far in this novel, which unravels rather than unfolds with its various voices. Her keen insights into the racist minds and hearts of the white students and nuns surrounding her at boarding school are on target; a credible display by a white author writing a black protagonist into a predominantly white environment. Nanda grows with no more of a context or community to see herself reflected in than her mother had, and so learns in quite the same way as Baby to take into herself bits of the world, fashioning a life like the filigree and fancy work of her mother's brilliant dressmaking business. Though the timelessness detaches us somewhat, Nanda's sparklingly original response to life is inspirational.