SOURCE: "Out on the Town," in Mother Jones, Vol. 14, No. 9, November, 1989, p. 54.

In the following review, Block describes the tone of Sure of You as serious, noting the novel's concern with such themes as the AIDS crisis and homosexuality.

"The thing of calling something a 'black' or a 'gay' or a 'women's' novel: it sounds like some medicine that you've got to take," writer Armistead Maupin says, smiling almost wearily. "And that does a terrible disservice to those of us who are simply trying to tell stories about the real world, simply trying to include the people into the real world where they belong."

There is still a hint of North Carolina to the author's accent: a reminder of the world he was born into, and its distance from the one he inhabits and writes about in his witty Tales of the City novels. A young protég...