The book makes space for rumination, complexity, and transience. It offers a unique window into the mind of one woman, at one moment in history, and by doing so examines beauty, sex, and art through her eyes. Once you get into the flow of Newman’s prose, you’ll find artistic and intellectual riches.

The sentences brim with rebellion and pleasure, creating a sensual odyssey of self-discovery and experience. … This delightfully smart and funny protagonist is a reminder of the difficulty and beauty of a life lived on its own terms.

The novel blends vernacular riffs with cameos from Reed and Muhammad Ali, Pharoah Sanders and Angela Davis, Melvin Van Peebles and Amiri Baraka.

This brilliant, long out-of-print novel was rescued by (who else?) New Directions…snappy asides and transitions appear as enjambments — pushing the pace forward like the ding of a typewriter carriage. The sensuousness is the point. This latest edition of Francisco gives a new generation of readers the opportunity to think about how little has changed in the culture industry’s relationship of convenience with Black artists.

Francisco is driven by its author’s vernacular wit and the narrator’s effort to ‘love an alive life.'

Francisco is a sly, poetically rendered time-capsule. Part dreamscape, part genre-fluid testimony, threaded through with an epistolary casualness, it blooms with the distinctive trappings of late-twentieth century California counterculture. Deceptively slight in size, it swirls with commentary on media, politics, class, race, a burgeoning second-wave feminism, and the flex and flare of the Black Power and Black Arts Movements. It’s about living outside the lines, but, too, it's about searching for one’s center...Montage-like and laced together in Mills Newman’s lowercase argot (part cadenced Black vernacular, part poetry), Francisco lifts off the page sentence by sentence, as if the text itself is charging forward. The scenes and situations share future/present space, fracture. Images skitter along like an art-film, shot with a hand-held camera. Characters appear, wedge a door open or find a seat, to chat for a spell before they tear off to their next adventure. They are, each and everyone, comrade or nemesis, her education.

When blackness, then and now, is so burdened with pain, it is a blessing to find a story of black lovers, written by a woman learning to love herself as she falls in love with Francisco.

Mills Newman’s exquisitely distilled novel, Francisco, is the song one would expect Love to be singing these troubled days of the 1970s—a song you cannot have heard before, off-key and haunting, disturbing even in its unfamiliarity.

Mills Newman has done the rare thing: written with beauty, power, and purity about a woman.

Francisco is a freely lustful text, rhapsodizing over the allure of the narrator’s new man (a 'black adonis in shorts'), from the thoughts in his head to his high-heeled blue shoes.

[Francisco] promises to introduce a new generation of readers to Newman’s innovative and genre-bending story.

Francisco coincided with second-wave feminism and the Black Power and Black Arts movements, and the content and style of the book draw on those currents. The novel’s defining traits are its experimental structure and its vernacular syntax. Mills Newman writes in lilting first-person sentences that lurch and flow like a jazz vamp.