"Conception is Buckhanon's second novel, a work of urban fiction that mixes the usual streetwise tales of woe with casual references to Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison and the occasional bit of French . . . The heroine is 15-year-old Shivana, who lives in a Chicago slum and believes that most black women stumble blindly into the same painful trap: meet some man, believe his sweet talk, bear his offspring, then watch him leave . . . Shivana's own mother has followed this scenario, ending up bitter and alone . . . Shivana, seeking love in all the wrong places, finds herself pregnant by the first older man who smiles her way. The question of the novel thus becomes whether she will decide to terminate the pregnancy or to keep the unborn child . . . [Conception is] the work of a gifted young novelist."—Kim McLarin, The Washington Post