This short novel works well not only in its entirety, but in section, making it especially useful in the classroom. Contextualizing the lives of people who might find their ways to hospital clinics or emergency rooms, The Women of Brewster Place focuses well on a wide range of complex issues, but ends with a vision of hope. Particularly relevant to medicine are the sections, "Lucielia Louise Turner," "Cora Lee," and "The Two."

In Lucielia Louise Turner, Naylor gives readers a portrait of a woman literally dying of grief and rage. It is Mattie’s intervention and her ability to place Lucielia’s grief in a historical context and to know it as one more instance of "murdered dreams" in a long history of such murders that undergirds her lifesaving and healing intervention. "Cora Lee" provides useful psychological insight into the reasons someone such as she would continue to have baby after baby, neglecting each when a new child is born.

In "The Two," Naylor knits together homophobia, racism, sexism, violence, and alcoholism in the brutal gang rape of Lorraine ("the most dangerous species in existence--human males with an erection to validate in a world that was only six feet wide" [p.170]), and its aftermath--her crazed murder of the alcoholic janitor, Ben, with whom she had become friends. Never solely victims, however, the novel insists not only on linking personal tragedy with social issues, but focuses as well on the strength and hope that arises from the ashes of pain.