[6] As well as appearing in a collection, the individual stories have also been published as separate books: often in large-format, illustrated editions for younger children.

[11] H. W. Boynton, writing in The Atlantic in 1903, commented that only a century earlier children had had to be content with the Bible, Pilgrim's Progress, Paradise Lost, and Foxe's Book of Martyrs.

He described the book as "artfully artless, in its themes, in its repetitions, in its habitual limitation, and occasional abeyance, of adult humor.

It strikes a child as the kind of yarn his father or uncle might have spun if he had just happened to think of it; and it has, like all good fairy-business, a sound core of philosophy".

[13] Sue Walsh observed in 2007 that critics have rigidly categorised Just So Stories as "Children's Literature", and have in consequence given it scant literary attention.

In her view, if critics mention the book at all, they talk about what kind of reading is good for children and what they are capable of understanding.

Held's 2014 account of evolutionary developmental biology ("evo-devo"), How the Snake Lost its Legs: Curious Tales from the Frontier of Evo-Devo, noted that while Kipling's Just So Stories "offered fabulous tales about how the leopard got its spots, how the elephant got its trunk, and so forth [and] remains one of the most popular children's books of all time", fables "are poor substitutes for real understanding."

Held aimed "to blend Darwin's rigor with Kipling's whimsy", naming the many "Curious Tales" such as "How the Duck Got its Bill" in his book in the style of Just So Stories, and observing that truth could be stranger than fiction.