A Widely Praised Writer
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."

Controversy Over the Book
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 for the slaves' captivity on Africans themselves. The author slowly and systematically excuses all the whites in the story for their participation in the slave venture and by innuendo places the blame elsewhere.

Binnie Tate, quoted in Cultural Conformity in Books for Children, wrote that the book "perpetuates racism ... [with] constantly repeated racist implications and negative illusions," and in the same volume, Sharon Bell Mathis called the book "an insult to black children."

In the case of The Slave Dancer, some have objected to the fact that the slaves are portrayed as non-resistant, demoralized, nameless victims. However, Hamida Bosmajian wrote about this namelessness in Nightmares of History, commenting that "both the point of view of the novel and the circumstances of history make it impossible to name the slaves. Only after the shipwreck can Jessie exchange names with Ras, the sole black survivor."

Controversy over the novel's possible racist undertones extended to the ceremony in which Fox received the Newbery Award for the book where there were demonstrations against the book. Fox was shaken by this news but gave her speech; afterward, some of the demonstrators came up to her and let her know that she was "forgiven."

Emotionally Accurate
In Nightmares of History, Hamida Bosmajian wrote that Fox "is accurate in portraying the psychology of human beings in extreme situations," referring to the changing and conflicting emotions Jessie experiences, from apathy to rage to detachment, and even occasional happiness. Bosmajian, who analyzed books dealing with historical traumatic events and their survivors, noted that in these situations, people often do not behave admirably, or as we would like them to behave. Bosmajian also wrote that:

we would like our children to sing songs of innocence, but it is difficult to delude children who have intimations of nuclear war. By breaking with the convictions of children's literature, [books such as The Slave Dancer] open spaces or blanks for the young readers' thoughts.

Uncompromising Moral Integrity
In an essay in Horn Book, Alice Bach described The Slave Dancer as "one of the finest examples of a writer's control over her material ... With an underplayed implicit sense of rage, Paula Fox exposes the men who dealt in selling human beings." In the New Statesman, Kevin Crossley-Holland wrote that the book is "a novel of great moral integrity ... From start to finish ... Fox tells her story quietly and economically; she is candid but she never wallows." And Bob Dixon, in Catching Them Young: Sex, Race and Class in Children's Fiction, praised the book as "a novel of great horror and as great humanity . . . [approaching] perfection as a work of art."

Bach also wrote that:

what sets Fox apart from other writers who are knocking out books as fast as kids can swallow them, is her uncompromising integrity. Fox is nobody's mouthpiece. Her unique vision admits to the child what he already suspects: Life is part grit, part disappointment, part nonsense, and occasionally victory ... And by offering children no more than the humanness we all share—child, adult, reader, writer—she acknowledges them as equals.

David Rees wrote in The Marble in the Water

that the way [Fox] constructs her plots and the way she uses the English language make her second to none. And in The Slave Dancer, she has given us a masterpiece, the equal of which would be hard to find.