[7] Author Orson Scott Card praised the novel as "miraculously good" and "so real, so original", but faulted Lindholm's use of "a vague, amorphous fog-like Evil Force" as the primary antagonist.

"[9] Sixteen years later, after the author began writing as Robin Hobb, publishers in France were interested in her Lindholm backlist and a translation titled Le Dernier Magicien was released.

Scholar Alexei Kondratiev, writing for Mythlore in 1986, argued that Lindholm's portrayal of Seattle was "depict[ed] with the same eye for mythopoeic detail that Saunders Ann Laubenthal brought to her evocation of Mobile in Excalibur".

[12] Academic Brian Attebery viewed the setting of the novel as sharing the aesthetic of works by Peter S. Beagle, Emma Bull and Nancy Willard, and suggested that it had "a particular concreteness that [...] provided firm ground and vivid detail to the narratives".

She also noted that the book's opening "no longer seems so charmingly, astonishingly odd as it did [when she first read it] in 1987", and emphasized her own discomfort with "glamourizing the homeless and making their lives and problems magical".