Books of a feather

Book: Guardians of Ga'Hoole Book One: The Capture


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:

http://youtu.be/KczxuINjk54

When bear and chicken part ways

Book: Fuzz and Pluck: Splitsville

Author: Ted Stearn

Published: 2008 (Fantagraphic Books)

Pages: They weren’t numbered and I didn’t count them. A lot. Ish.

I was going to draw a review of this book, then spent the last three days realizing that no, I still can’t draw in any recognizable form. So!

This is a comic about Pluck, a chicken with no feathers, and Fuzz, a stuffed bear, as watched by their guardian angel doppelgangers, as they start off working at Mr. Lardy’s fast food restaurant. They get separated when Fuzz goes to run an errand for Mr. Lardass and gets chased away by a dog and then rescued by an old dude who’s obsessive about making his ferry run right between two (perfectly good but don’t tell him that) bridges, and Pluck gets fired when he beats up an insulting customer and ends up joining a gladiator team that battles for their own jobs on a floating stadium. Pluck is a runaway success and ends up getting chucked overboard by a jealous teammate (a boxing rabbit) and rival team manager (a sentient lemon half) into the very river in which Fuzz floats in the ferry after accidentally killing its owner.

…Actually, I think my drawings made just as much sense as this.

• Engaging story that didn’t make sense but didn’t act like it had to.
• Cool pen and ink drawings, especially of Sourpuss (the lemon).
• Not really funny; not sure if it was supposed to be or not. Not sure how or if this was broken down in another medium (ie, strips or pages posted on a website); seemed designed for a straight through read.

And ye gads and little fishies, another yellow book cover. This is seriously and for real the second-to-last library book I will ever read until I get done with my other books. I SWEAR. *puts hand on copy of White Teeth*