It held me -- from first to last -- and that in spite of the fact that I share the public's tendency toward discounting Negro novels by white authors as imitative Julia Peterkin. This has a distinction and individuality which pulls it out of any class but its own. The characters are sharply real -- the adroit use of Negro phraseology gives one a sense of getting inside the racial limitations and psychology -- there is no sense of an outsider looking in, but rather of a picture from the inside of the lives of real people, with their simple joys and sorrows, their unexpected shifts from normality, their superstitions and ignorance and fears. Eenic is an unforgettable character. There is closer analogy to Porgy than to any other Negro story I can recall.