With Miss Norton's usual skilled writing, solid construction and sympathetic characters, [Operation Time Search] is a pleasure to read and to recommend. It begins when a government project's attempt to break through to an alternate world accidentally projects photographer Ray Osborne thousands of years back in time. In this distant era, Atlantis is a powerful but evil nation, now at war with Mu, whose people worship the purity of the Flame…. There is little here of the provocative speculation, insight or satire which characterizes the best adult science fiction, just a good moralistic adventure story (with a slightly surprising end) in which the righteous Murians are pitted against the evil rulers of Atlantis. (p. 134)

Margaret A. Dorsey, in School Library Journal (reprinted from the September, 1967 issue of School Library Journal, published by R. R. Bowker Co. A Xerox Corporation; copyright © 1967), September, 1967.

Miss Norton's extraordinary imagination is again at work [in The Zero Stone] as she reels her hero from a city where they choose sacrificial victims by lottery to a ship where he is condemned as a plague victim through space sans ship where the "Zero stone" acts as a strange propellant to a planet with hidden tombs bearing the bodies of the "Fore-runner races," creatures of legend. Good sustaining action in what could be the start of a very nice series. (p. 191)

Kirkus Service (copyright © 1968 Virginia Kirkus' Service, Inc.), February 15, 1968.

By now it is a truism to say that fantasy must be anchored by a convincing and realistic background. But this can be taken further. Ideally, fantasy and reality should reach the same level of intensity and maturity. Fantasy loses its potential power if the real background, though convincing itself, is also in some senses too lightweight for it.

For this is the chief criticism to be made of Andre Norton's interesting and accomplished Octagon Magic…. [This is a] very subtle and delicate story; in which little is explained but everything explicable; in which the overtones, the implications are fascinating. The fantasy is marvellously controlled; the careful, loving use of detail reminiscent occasionally of Lucy Boston's work…. You are slid imperceptibly from one world to another, never sure how and when the transition will come. Similarly you are given no simple answers. Miss Ashemeade has all the moral severity of her generation; but this is part of her character, not merely the simplistic morality which it didactically expressed in the everyday background of school life. Here the polite introduction of the colour problem in Lorrie's friend Elizabeth is typical. So, too, is the moral for lonely Lorrie: learn to join in dear, be friendly with those with whom you haven't much in common—you will be popular in the end. All the lonely misfits sigh and wish it was as easy as that.

It is as if the fantasy world frees Miss Norton's adult sensibilities—whereas in the real world she is audience conscious and afraid of ambiguity and uncertainty. It seems a pity in this sometimes illuminating and beautiful book, like mouthfuls of porridge in syllabub. (p. 584)

The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1968; reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission), June 6, 1968.

One of the valid remaining distinguishing tests of science fiction is that of thoroughness, distinction in which can raise an exceptional novel above the high level now achieved by most published work in this field. [In Star Man's Son ] Mrs. Norton wins high regard as the mere length of this work shows. Her...