Strong Winds series allusion to Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series as well as other works, particularly R.L. Stevenson's "Treasure Island" and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha". Cassandra Jardine, reviewing for "The Daily Telegraph", wrote ""The Salt-Stained Book"... is not just a homage to the Swallows and Amazons stories. Donny and Anna, Jones's fictional characters, live in the contemporary world, escaping social workers, rather than pirates. There's far more emotion than in Ransome's books" but "they share the same confident, risk-taking spirit..." Amanda Craig, reviewing "The Salt-stained Book" for "The Times" "...wasn't sure about the historical framing device that gives the novel
Swallows and Amazons series shaggy heads of hair or hats". The sixth book in the series, "Pigeon Post", won the inaugural Carnegie Medal from the Library Association in June 1937, recognising the best 1936 children's book by a British subject. It was reviewed in "The New York Times" the month after J. B. Lippincott & Co. of Philadelphia published the first U.S. edition. Ellen Lewis Buell welcomed the latest work in the six-year-old series that had firmly established "a special niche in juvenile literature". She noted the children's "vivid collective imagination which turned play into serious business" (hunting a gold mine on the moors)