"Go Ask Alice" received positive initial reviews, including praise from Webster Schott in "The New York Times", who called it an "extraordinary work", a "superior work" and a "document of horrifying reality possesses literary quality". It was also recommended by "Library Journal", "Publishers Weekly", and "The Christian Science Monitor", and ranked number 1 on the American Library Association's 1971 list of Best Books for Young Adults. Some reviews focused on the realism of the book's material, without further addressing the literary merit of the book. According to Nilsen and Lauren Adams, the book was not subjected to the regular forms of literary criticism because it was presumed to be the real diary of a dead teenager. Lina Goldberg has suggested that the publishers were motivated to list the author as "Anonymous" partly to avoid such criticism.