As already mentioned, When the Owl Cries was widely and enthusiastically reviewed throughout the country. The following are excerpts from some of these reviews:
"When the Owl Cries is a novel rich in pictorially vivid reading. As you turn the pages, you ask, What next? That is the immemorial appeal of the thriller. But what gives the story stature as a work of art is that Bartlett has been at pains to populate it with believable characters who are stirred by intensely personal concerns."—Charles Poore, in the New York Times
"The book charms with its expert knowledge of place and people."—Paul Engle, in the Chicago Tribune
"Vivid, impressive, highly pictorial. What makes it a pleasure to read are its marvelous vignettes of Mexican ways of life."—Lon Tinkle, in the Dallas News
"Only rarely is an American writer gifted with the perception and sensitivity required to translate into English the intensity and sense of tragedy of the Latin races."—Joe Knefler, in the L. A. Times
"Mr. Bartlett has given us a powerful, unusual and taunting novel, filled with characters as real as the headlines in today's papers, who move toward the inevitability of defeat like figures in a Greek tragedy."—D. Evan Gwen, in the Oxford Mail
"A Gone with the Wind of Mexico."—Library Journal
"The Spirit and atmosphere of Mexico breathe from every page of Paul Bartlett's poignant novel."—Clifford Gessler, in the Oakland Tribune
"This is a book the reader can see in his mind—on a wide screen in technicolor with stereophonic sound. It doesn't need Hollywood but it's the kind of story that wouldn't do the movies any harm."—Florida Times-Union
"The interiors are magnificent: the feeling one gets of candles and bronze and rosemaries and Spanish furniture and nostalgia and hatred."—London Times Literary Supplement