Critics find much meat on the bones of Angelou's first attempt at nonfiction. Journalist Greg Hitt remarks on the recurrent themes of growth and self-evaluation, which she pursues with honesty and candor. Sidonie Anne Smith of Southern Humanities Review notes that Angelou is able to "recapture the texture of the way of life in the texture of its idioms, its idiosyncratic vocabulary and especially in its process of image-making." This unabashed joy in metaphor splashed with dialect and soaked in reflection comprises the book's major strength. Angelou's energetic delvings into the black community of the Depression-era South reject dolor and self-pity in favor of a full range of emotions — from wonderment at an older brother's bold, funny shenanigans to his vulnerability and dismay at a bloated corpse pulled from a pond and deposited in a jail cell — from tentative exploration of boy-girl relations to emotional release in the singing of the black national anthem.
In contrast, some appraisers find reason to question Angelou's notoriety as an autobiographer. In her thorough discussion of Angelou's literary style, Selwyn R. Cudjoe, in Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, challenges the authenticity of the author's point of view, which Cudjoe suspects of distorting childhood perceptions with adult consciousness. In self-criticism, Angelou admitted to interviewer Carol E. Neubauer that maintaining a voice consistent with the time represented in the autobiography was difficult, but that she was encouraged enough by her early success to consider recreating some childhood incidents which, at the first writing, seemed too elusive for her skills. An unabashed fan, British reviewer Paul Bailey, sweeps away the doubts of both critic and author with frank admiration for Angelou's skillful verisimilitude: "If you want to know what it was like to live at the bottom of the heap before, during and after the American Depression, this exceptional book will tell you."
