It won't come as a surprise to readers of contemporary fiction by black women that Gloria Naylor has few kind words to waste on members of the other sex. Yet The Women of Brewster Place, like Alice Walker's extraordinary The Color Purple,… is not simply a self-indulgent celebration of female solidarity. Naylor and Walker write with equal lucidity about the cruelty that poverty breeds and the ways in which people achieve redemption. Nor is there a wariness about traditional women's roles. The Women of Brewster Place is a novel about motherhood, a concept embraced by Naylor's women, each of whom is a surrogate child or mother to the next. (p. 38)

Dorothy Wickenden, in a review of "The Women of Brewster Place," in The New Republic (reprinted by permission of The New Republic; © 1982 The New Republic, Inc.), Vol. 187, No. 10, September 6, 1982, pp. 37-8.