She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, the Authors Guild, and SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research.
William H. Gass described her writing as "quiet, lyrical, deeply meditative" prose from which a "lovely and mysterious" meaning emerges.... "It is a process that is wonderful to watch."
Novelist Hilma Wolitzer wrote that Petroski "understands perfectly the world of childhood and makes the reader see the ways in which we become adults."
Maritime historian Joan Druett described A Bride's Passage as "a superbly written, formidably researched retelling of Susan Hathorn's honeymoon voyage through the pages of her diary."
She won the Texas Institute of Letters Prize in short fiction, and her biography of Susan Hathorn, A Bride's Passage: Susan Hathorn's Year Under Sail, won the John Lyman Prize for Biography and was hailed as "a valuable social history of a maritime family in mid-19th-century New England."