Miss Anne in Harlem has received a great review in The Daily Beast in a feature titled, "Women Without Race." Wendy Smith writes:
"In Miss Anne In Harlem, Carla Kaplan's clear-sighted, empathetic assessment of a half-dozen of these women, she casts a fresh eye over people and relationships too often reduced to stereotypes. She explores the complicated reality of individual lives to illuminate our collective struggle with fraught questions about race and identity that are as uncomfortable and unresolved today as they were in the 1920s and '30s....the Miss Annes of the Harlem Renaissance have suffered the double indignity of being demonized at the time as thrill-seeking dilettantes and then dismissed by historians as patronizing. Kaplan takes it as her mission "to let Miss Anne speak for herself, to reconstruct her reasons for being in Harlem and her ideas about race, rather than simply passing judgment on her." She delivers a wonderfully complex series of portraits....In an allegedly post-racial nation, where the son of a white woman is nonetheless described as America's first black president, we can hardly condescend to the often confused ideas Kaplan investigates with critical sympathy."