[3] The story follows a woman named Evelyn as her imaginary childhood companion, a faun called Pan, makes a real-world appearance in the midst of a crisis in her adult life.

[4] In 1992 author Orson Scott Card, writing in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, described the story as passionately written and having a quality of "mythic resonance", while finding its structure awkward.

He concluded: "you must experience it, if only to feel again the hard, driving pulse of raw storytelling that is so commonly drained out of more traditional, predictable tales".

[5] In a review of the French edition, Le Monde described it as "a singular and moving novel that is a magnificent ode to Mother Nature",[2] and as a "major work" of the author.

[1] Several reviewers felt that Cloven Hooves was semi-autobiographical, seeing resemblances between Evelyn's childhood in the Alaskan wilderness and the author's own life.