Paula Fox has been praised by many critics for the beauty, clarity, authority, and subtle poetry of her prose, as well as the depth of her ideas and her execution of them in fiction. The Slave Dancer is generally considered one of her finest works. For example, John Rowe Townsend wrote in A Sounding of Storytellers that The Slave Dancer "is a historical novel of weight and intensity which stands on its own, at a distance from [Fox's] other books," and called the book her "finest achievement."
Although the book has been widely praised, some critics have objected to it, claiming that it is racist. In Interracial Books for Children, Binnie Tate wrote that:
through the characters' words, [Fox] excuses the captors
and places the blame.....
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