Edith Jackson's hard luck story started in Guy's The Friends…. On her own [in Edith Jackson], after rejecting a Reverend with roving hands as a foster father, Edith hooks up for hit-and-run sex with a street person who telegraphs his undesirability at every turn…. At the end, Edith is awaiting an abortion—pathetically, her one and only act of self-determination. Edith is no statistic—there's complexity in Guy's portrait of one so stunted she can't even make it as a martyr—but the impact is diminished by overwrought writing and the author's short cut of cataloging characters' feelings ("Crying, hysterical. Going crazy.") instead of conveying them.

Pamela D. Pollack, in her review of "Edith Jackson," in School Library Journal (reprinted from the April, 1978 issue of School Library Journal, published by R. R. Bowker Co./A Xerox Corporation; copyright © 1978), Vol. 24, No. 8, April, 1978, p. 93.