Мечтатель

The book was marketed as an adult book in Italy, where it sold well.

literacymatters.com includes the book as part of a lesson plan for primary school teachers.

The book was adapted for BBC Radio by Ivan Jones in 2008.

American novelist David Leavitt in The New York Times praises McEwan's imagination, but writes that "fantastic passages" are infrequent and a larger portion is devoted to charting the "everyday calamities of Peter's suburban life", that the staples of the genre "get dutifully dragged out for a rehash." He opines that like most authors of adult fiction who then went on to write children's books, McEwan has a tendency to talk down to the reader. Ending the review, Leavitt concluded that McEwan is at his best when he simply writes, not when he is "writing for children".
Paul Taylor writes in The Independent that McEwan, whose early novels concerned "dark and deviant" material, was "too strenuously engaged in keeping the sweetness-and-light levels high".
Robert Winder in the New Statesman calls the novel a "lovely children's book ... which captures the gulfs between children and grown-ups more vividly than he does [in Atonement]".
Tom Shone in The New York Times writes that the book "had a nice Roald Dahl-like streak of malice to it".