Andre Norton's style is not to everyone's taste. She writes sentences like "Hunger was a discomfort within Sander" and "The creatures hopped rather than walked as might men, yet they were not slow." But she is a superb story-teller with a narrative pace all her own. [In "No Night Without Stars"] she tells the tale of Sander and Fanyi, a young man and woman in a post-nuclear-holocaust world who team up to seek the dangerous knowledge of the Before People.

Unlike some writers of S.F. juveniles, who pile sensation on sensation for fear of losing their audience, Norton slowly unfolds a succession of images that first intrigue and finally engulf the reader. To reach their destination, Sander and Fanyi must travel across a dry sea-bed where they discover not only those mutated hopping horrors but also the rusting hull of an ancient submarine and some even more...