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.

Paul Heins, in his review of "Edith Jackson," in The Horn Book Magazine (copyright © 1978 by The Horn Book, Inc., Boston), Vol. LV, No. 5, October, 1978, p. 524.