The characters in The whistling boy are absorbed in the past for one reason or another, often to the exclusion of the present. In an East Anglian setting, we follow the parallel journeys of a boy and a girl—his into a past which has confused him, hers towards a better understanding of her young stepmother. The idea of possession of one person's mind by the projection of another—doll, person, idea—has persisted through many of Ruth Arthur's books and each time she deepens the feeling of mystery by her close attention to the temperament and the perplexities of young people in the present. In this story, also, her skill in bringing a particular landscape before our eyes and making it important in the story is particularly to be admired…. The author's gift for suggesting personality through description and talk is seen especially in the way she brings working-class Sammie to life; this boy of trenchant speech and determination lends colour to a crowded but somehow, light-weight story. (pp. 1397-98)

The Whistling Boy offers a dream-like first person narration by a brooding, self-centred adolescent girl passing through a "difficult" phase. The sea-washed setting, too, is intentionally part of the drama; and again, as in earlier books, the girl's restlessness catches something super-natural in the air, a link, perhaps with the place's bygone history. To make such a narrator likeable—to avoid the commonplaces and even vulgarities of the private thoughts of a heroine of this kind—is far from easy, as earlier books have shown, but in the present novel one senses a caution about these pitfalls. (p. 1199)

The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1969; reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission), October 16, 1969.

[The Saracen Lamp is decidedly] queer like its predecessors, though not quite as sinister, perhaps; and hauntedly reminiscent of one in particular—the Requiem for a Princess (1967)…. Something's awry with three grotesquely pathological heroines—not to mention, materially, how much the long-suffering plot is wounded by the leaps and bounds. (p. 248)

Kirkus Reviews (copyright © 1970 The Kirkus Service, Inc.), March 1, 1970.

Ruth Arthur usually speaks through an adolescent girl, and the girl (if sympathetic) is always the same: full of sensibility and idealism, often handicapped, but brave withal. If the girl is unsympathetic, she tends to become monstrously melodramatic, like Alys in this story, The Saracen Lamp. Romantic magazine fiction geared to the young girl, it is compounded of the author's richest, sweetest ingredients: the enchanting old house exerting its spell, the ancient feature uncovered in the garden, the "talisman" … which brings blessing, the "possession" of a healthy person by a malicious ghost. Three girls of the family tell their tales, in 1300, in the sixteenth century, and now. The first, Mélisande's, is the most appealing: her wedding procession is like a picture in a French Book of Hours. Romantic girls, from Catherine Morland to the present ones, adore family seats and secrets, ghosts and talismans, and will doubtless revel in this story. Life, soon enough, can be trusted forcibly to inject some realism. (p. 711)

The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1970; reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission), July 2, 1970.