There is no longer any doubt about it. The author of "The Street," "Country Place," and now "The Narrows" is a neighborhood novelist…. "The Narrows," whose history and way of life [Ann Petry] chronicles in her newest novel, is the Negro area … in a New England town….

A novel about Negroes by a Negro novelist and concerned, in the last analysis, with racial conflict, "The Narrows" somehow resists classification as a "Negro novel," as contradictory as that may sound. In this respect Ann Petry has achieved something as rare as it is commendable. Her book reads like a New England novel, and an unusually gripping one.

Arna Bontemps, "The Line," in The Saturday Review (copyright © 1953 by Saturday Review; all rights reserved; reprinted by permission), Vol. 36, No. 34, August 22, 1953, p. 11.