Fluent but never terse, the author compounds the mystery [that is the center of The Callender Papers] with a multitude of details and digressions, some of which border on melodrama. And Jean, so young in years, may strain the reader's credulity with her mature, self-possessed first-person account, which occasionally dips into fairly complex moral, and even philosophical, discussions.

Ethel L. Heins, in a review of "The Callender Papers," in The Horn Book Magazine, Vol. 59, No. 4, August, 1983, p. 458.