SOURCE: A review of Roadwalkers, in Belles Lettres, Vol. 10, No. 2, Spring, 1995, p. 86.

In the following review of Roadwalkers, Bryant describes Grau's skill in evoking the narrator's viewpoint.

Time is an indeterminate factor in this new novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Shirley Ann Grau. Roadwalkers begins with the story of Baby, a homeless and abandoned black girl whose early nomadic life struggle leaves her with a wispy memory, and forces her to approach life with stunning inventiveness. This first section of the book is appropriately and beautifully ethereal: events recalled in the language of a child who has never known a definitive context, and so creates her own. This device which initially underscores the plot becomes occasionally murky and not quite believable, however, as the novel is laid out in fits and starts. Soon after we learn about and become invested in Baby, Grau jolts us with the long...