Sandra took to the streets when she was eight years old and tried to fight off the hunger pangs by shoplifting and moving into the profits of drug pushing. Then she met Chink and discovered love and affection . . . and rape and murder

In his five-year literary career, Donald Goines provided perhaps the most sustained, multifaceted, realistic fiction picture ever created by one author of the lives, choices, and frustrations of underworld ghetto blacks. Almost single-handedly, Goines established the conventions and the popular momentum for a new fictional genre, which could be called ghetto realism. --Greg Goode, University of Rochester