SOURCE: “Sister Bonds: Intersection of Family and Race in Jessie Redmon Fauset's Plum Bun and Dorothy West's The Living Is Easy,” in The Significance of Sibling Relationships in Literature, edited by JoAnna Stephens Mink and Janet Doubler Ward, Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1993, pp. 120-32.

In the following essay, a psychological study of the protagonists of The Living Is Easy and Jessie Redmon Fauset's Plum Bun, Reuschmann argues that the relationship between Cleo and her sisters is central to an understanding of her complex character.

It is the interactions among sisters that instigate the heroine's journey toward self, toward psyche. … Our sisterly relationships challenge and nurture us, even as we sometimes disappoint and betray one another.

Christine Downing, Psyche's Sisters (3-4).

While the conflicted mother-daughter bond has garnered much attention by feminist critics and theorists in the last decade, an analysis of biological sisterhood is noticably absent...