SOURCE: "McMillan Arrives," in English Journal, Vol. 85, No. 4, April, 1996, pp. 86-7.

In the following review, Canty offers high praise for Waiting to Exhale.

Move over Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, make room for Terry McMillan. McMillan will need a lot of room on the bench of elite, female African American writers if her latest novel, Waiting to Exhale, is any indication of her true talent. In addition to Waiting to Exhale, McMillan has two other novels to her credit; Mama (1987) and Disappearing Acts (1980) were McMillan's first two fictional endeavors. She also edited Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Fiction (1990), a very popular collection of short stories.

Waiting to Exhale quickly established McMillan as a major force among contemporary female fiction writers. The novel lived up to the praises of my colleagues and turned out to be one of the most well written, true-to-life books I had ever...