"It is one of those children's books which to reopen in after life is like revisiting some sunny old garden, some favorite haunt of childhood, where every nook and cranny seems famliar and calls up a thousand pleasant memories." -- Anne Gilchrist
"Not a mere prose version of the plays for juvenile amusement but a critical introduction to the study of Shakespeare in the finest sense."
The "Pepper books," as they are known to thousands of children, are happy, sunshiny stories of a family poor in worldly goods, but rich in lively boys and girls and imbued with a splendid home spirit.
"Miss Yong's histories for children are written in a sinple and interesting style presenting the striking and picturesque events."
Review: "No one else seems to have thought of telling the story of a boy's life with so great desire to show what a boy's life is and with so little purpose of teaching what it should be: certainly no one else has ever thought of doing this, for the American boy." -- W. D. Howells
"It is a genuine fairy work interlaced with the unexpected, alive with marvels. -- No child will be sadder and many will be happier, for learning without knowint it, how to bear suffering, if it shalll come to him." -- Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward