SOURCE: A review of How Many Miles to Babylon?, in Washington Post Book World, October 8, 1967, p. 24.

In the following review, Goodwin praises the uncanny realism in How Many Miles to Babylon? but expresses reservations about the book's appropriateness for young readers.

Paula Fox has demonstrated an almost uncanny insight into young boys in two earlier stories, Maurice's Room and A Likely Place. Now, with equal skill [in How Many Miles to Babylon?], she takes a highly imaginative, lonely Negro boy of "barely 10" through a nightmarish day. James knows what is real—that his father is gone and he is living in a small, shabby room in Brooklyn with three old aunts who are caring for him while his mother is in the hospital. But what James feels is very different—that his mother has gone to Africa to tell people he is a prince and to "fix everything...