SOURCE: Rifkind, Donna. “Eatery at the Edge of the World.” Washington Post Book World 22, no. 41 (11 October 1992): 5.

In the following review, Rifkind offers a mixed assessment of Bailey's Cafe.

Gloria Naylor's is a commanding fictional voice: sonorous, graceful, sometimes piercing, often spellbinding. At its best, it's the kind of voice that moves you along as if you were dreaming. But it runs the risk, at its worst, of overpowering the voices of her own carefully imagined characters.

Naylor offers characteristic highs and lows in her fourth book, Bailey's Cafe. Like the author's 1983 prize-winning novel, The Women of Brewster Place, the new book is set up as a series of interweaving life portraits. We are in Brooklyn, 1948: Bailey, the cafe's proprietor, presides over the grill while his taciturn wife Nadine runs the cash register.

The coffee here is bad and the food worse, but the place has a mystical pull...