+ N Y Times p14 O 3 ’20 1900w
“If ever the word unique is appropriate to a literary production, certainly it is here. The reader sometimes tires of the singular manner and strange expressions in the diary, but he never fails to feel the genuine fineness and charm of Opal’s love for animals and trees and all of out-of-doors, and her sweetness and affection toward the few human beings who responded to her appeal.”
+ Outlook 126:201 S 29 ’20 1150w
Reviewed by E. L. Pearson
+ − Review 3:269 S 29 ’20 120w
“The book is so incessantly sentimental as to be very tiresome reading to most English people—Americans seem to have stronger stomachs. Again, the inverted style is tedious—almost perhaps as tedious as the humour.”
− Spec 125:504 O 16 ’20 750w
“The style of the diary is irresistible. Full of quaint phrases, unconscious humor, the profound philosophies of childhood, the sentences move along in solemn, yet sparkling procession.”
+ Springf’d Republican p9a O 24 ’20 720w
“It is not safe to dogmatize upon the limits of precocity, but the hand at work in many passages is prima facie not that of the six-year-old, but of the more mature professional humorist. Whatever be the solution, the main interest of the book is its vitality of imagination and its pregnancy of issues bearing upon child life remains unaffected.”