 Bond borrowed some of its elements for her novel, and may have heard the girls reading aloud or read from one of their copies of the book.The initial scholarly response to the book appeared in a collection of essays entitled "In Search of Hannah Crafts", featuring literary scholars Nina Baym, Lawrence Buell, William Andrews, John Stauffer, William Gleason, and many others.Scholar Anne Fabian, for example, argued that Crafts is a literary iconoclast and rule breaker, breaking the rules that governed texts previously written and published by slaves.