SOURCE: Bader, Eleanor J. “Boerum Hill Blues.” Belles Lettres 8, no. 2 (winter 1992): 29.

In the following review, Bader praises the creation and blending of the characters who occupy George Street, a fictional neighborhood in Street Games.

George Street, the scene of Rosellen Brown's 14 interrelated short stories, is fictional, but Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, the neighborhood she writes about in Street Games, is not. Like many changing neighborhoods, Boerum Hill was once peopled with newly arrived Puerto Ricans and American-born New Yorkers. Then, in the early to mid-1970s, the professionals who would later be called Yuppies discovered the area's rundown brownstones and proximity to Wall Street. Describing themselves as “urban homesteaders,” they bought property and began renovations. As oak front doors replaced metal ones, and as gas lamps lit up previously dark streets, the neighborhood took on a new and uncomfortable tension.

Whites talked about wanting to live in multiracial harmony...