The Jargoon Pard belongs to that section of André Norton's writing which she calls "sword and sorcery"…. André Norton has always adopted a consciously archaic, literary style for this kind of story and in this one she has I think overdone it; inversions, archaisms, tortuous formality hold up even the highly dramatic opening scene and make the complex plot unnecessarily hard to follow. The chivalric note, the idea of personal honour is strong in the book but over and above this element there is something that seems still more important, the idea that man is distancing himself from the animal kingdom in which so much of his ancestry and aptitude rests. Kethan's changes from man to beast and back to man are far more than a device to hold the attention and further the plot. (pp. 2709-10)
Margery Fisher, in her Growing Point, October, 1975.
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