Kristin Hunter's importance as a writer can best be measured in three areas. First, her work has heralded contemporary novels by and about black women in America. Until the 1970s, black women writers of the Harlem Renaissance, such as Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston, had provided the most credible explorations of black female experience. Hunter therefore stands at a pivotal point by sowing the fertile field for writers such as Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, and Gayl Jones. Second, Hunter's successful series of didactic children's books have reached a neglected audience of black children and young adults and provided hopeful alternatives to the devastation of ghetto experience. Third, her portrayal of black communal life in the urban North brings out the best of black strengths and character even as she pictures socioeconomic forces that choke black development. In these portrayals, she consistently demonstrates...