Although the novel was scheduled to be published by Sourcebooks in 2019, it was canceled by Jackson soon before release when it faced backlash on social media for perceived insensitivities in its depiction of the Kosovo War.

[4] Jackson had also been a prominent critic of Blood Heir by Amélie Wen Zhao, a young adult novel that in January 2019 faced accusations of racial insensitivity on social media before its publication.

Booklist called the novel "a pulse-pounding, emotional roller coaster, showcasing Jackson’s ability to balance the tenderness of a love story against the complexities and horrors of a country at war.

"[12] Wesley Jacques wrote in The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books that the novel "oversimplified" the historical context with a "cartoonish" villain while lauding its "kickass queer representation".

[13] The book's marketing included blurbs from young adult authors such as Shaun David Hutchinson, praising it as "a masterful debut," and Heidi Heilig, who called it "an intricate, rich story".

[16] Jackson was dropped from the lineup of an upcoming literary festival and reportedly removed from a private Facebook group for young adult fiction.

[1][8][14] Six days after the Goodreads review was posted, Jackson released a statement apologizing for the novel's "problematic representation and historical insensitivities", writing: "I failed to fully understand the people and the conflict that I set around my characters.

Jennifer Senior of The New York Times said that although Jackson "can write with charm and the authentic sass of an American adolescent, much of the book is painfully clumsy and poorly paced — which makes it a fairly typical debut novel, by the way.

He observed that while the opposing Serbian forces had perpetrated the majority of wartime atrocities, the KLA had also murdered civilians and committed other war crimes.

"[4] Ruth Graham of Slate criticized the incident as an example of the "increasingly toxic online culture" in young adult literature, "with evermore-baroque standards for who can write about whom under what circumstances.

[3] The New York Times' Jennifer Senior called the incident "frightening", saying that A Place for Wolves "should have failed or succeeded in the marketplace of ideas" instead of being canceled outright.

"[1] In an article for Reason, Jesse Singal characterized the online critics of A Place for Wolves and other controversial young adult novels as "left-wing identitarians" who believed that "the more marginalized you are, the better you are as a person."