[In The Life I Really Lived], Orpha Chase tells this story as though both she and the story were real. It is well told, but there are too many details…. She takes us from Kentucky to California, from backwoods to enlightened America confusing geography and people so that the reader develops no deep interest in either the circumstance or the result. Too long for young adult collections, she has tried to involve too many stories, so that none of them is clear.

Betty S. Reardon, "'The Life I Really Lived'," in Young Adult Cooperative Book Review Group of Massachusetts, Vol. 16, No. 3, February, 1980, p. 59.