SOURCE: "A Cruel World, Endless Until a Teacher Steps In," in The New York Times, June 14, 1996, p. B8.

[In the following review, Kakutani suggests that an ideological subtext diminishes the emotional impact of the narrative in Push, which makes it "disturbing, affecting and manipulative all at the same time."]

What do you get if you borrow the notion of an idiosyncratic teen-age narrator from J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and mix it up with the feminist sentimentality and anger of Alice Walker's Color Purple? The answer is Push, a much-talked-about first novel by a poet named Sapphire, a novel that manages to be disturbing, affecting and manipulative all at the same time.

Like Celie in The Color Purple, the heroine of Push is the survivor of a brutal childhood and youth; at the age of 16, Claireece or "Precious" as she calls herself, has already had two...