[The Friends established Rosa Guy] as a major novelist concerned with "the grotesque in life and character." Now she has written a raw and powerful work that centers on a sixteen-year-old boy from the streets of Harlem…. The second half of the book is a shocking, suspenseful whodunit; but all of the book, transcending race and environment, is a remarkably mature exposure—as clean and penetrating as surgery—of fear and loneliness, desperation and suffering, deception and pride. (pp. 62-3)

Ethel L. Heins, in her review of "The Disappearance," in The Horn Book Magazine (copyright © 1980 by The Horn Book, Inc., Boston), Vol. LVI, No. 1, February, 1980, pp. 62-3.