Author: Kathryn Lasky
Published: 2003 (scholastic)
Pages: 219
Owls! I love owls. I like nighttime better than daylight (although my sleep schedule is convinced otherwise), I've always wanted to fly, and their paradoxical combination of cute and fierce is what I strive for when I bare my fangs before brushing my hair in the mornings.
So this book's combination of adventure story and owl education kept me amused. Great choice to narrate through a young owl (although the name "Soren" will forever conjure up Cracked.com for me, so I was giggling about remembered dick jokes and history lessons all through a children's book). That way the owl life-cycle and different species could be explained through organic discovery processes.
Which doesn't mean that was a seamless segue all the time, but even when clumsily dropped into exposition, the educational bits were interesting. The adventure story was a typical hero's quest, but--guys, these were baby owls who got kidnapped by a cult that used the moon to brainwash them into--what? I don't know. They elude the moon-washing and escape to go find this mythic tree. I also don't know what that's like because there are fourteen more books in this series and I guess they'll stretch it out.
I will not be stretching with them, but only because I have other books to tend to first. In the meantime, I will continue to watch this YouTube video for an owl fix:
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