The "Cleveland Plain Dealer" said that "A Day No Pigs Would Die" is "a fantastic adventure, told simply and graphically, with echoes somehow of Mark Twain and of Stephen Vincent Benet". The New York Times claimed that "you'll find yourself caught up in the novel's emotion from the very opening scene which will grab you and not let you go...love suffuses every pages" and likened it stylistically to "True Grit" and "Addie Pray". The Boston Globe deemed it "honest, moving, homely in the warm and simple sense of the word," and Jerry Weiss and James Alexander have agreed, calling it, respectively, "homespun culture at its finest" and "a bucolic gentle book". The "School Library Journal" said it shows "plenty of Yankee common sense and dry wit, and some pathos... is for boys of this age and for the young of any age". And Newsweek declared that "reading this book is like sipping hot cider in front of a crackling potbellied stove. Every page is suffused with wit and charm and glowing with warmth."