Few writers of fiction for young people are as daring, inventive, and challenging to read—or to review—as Virgina Hamilton. Frankly making demands on her readers, she nevertheless expresses herself in a style essentially simple and concise—though often given to outbursts of intense feeling. And meeting those demands, the reader not only forgives but learns to enjoy her small lapses into obscurity, which a less subtle writer would find intolerable.

Not quite fifteen, Tree (short for Teresa) [the protagonist in Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush] was bright and self-reliant; every day she came home from school promptly, her whole existence centered on looking after Dab, her retarded older brother, whom she adored. Ever since she could remember, they had had no father and were mysteriously devoid of other relatives—except for their mother, Viola, "whom they called Muh Vy, Muh Vy, spoken M'Vy…. [But M'Vy] was absent...