RaveThe New York Times Book Review... fascinating ... shows McKay presciently grappling with the destinies of those he calls the \'outcasts and outlaws of civilizations\' — migrants in thriving port cities central to the flow of global commerce — and with the violent upheavals and desperate striving that deposited them there ... McKay’s political critique remains biting ... what is remarkable about McKay’s fiction is its rejection of sentimentality of any stripe. Unlike some of his peers in the New Negro Renaissance, McKay refuses to make his fiction \'decorous and decorative\' in order to paint a flattering portrait of black life, opting instead for what he admitted could be a \'crude realism\' ... queer desire is simply a fact — an acknowledged part of the social landscape — in a way that makes the book seem all the more ahead of its time. The sex is not explicit, but the couplings are impassioned: sometimes vicious, sometimes tender, sometimes vulgar, but above all raw.
