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

Put a bird on it

Book: Birds of a Lesser Paradise

Author: Megan Mayhew Bergman

Published: 2012 (Scribner)

Pages: 221

I found a way to check out this book because it’s short stories with an owl on the cover. It knows how to get my attention.

And I enjoyed these stories, albeit in a very quiet way. They are prime examples of lit fic, with one potentially interesting stab at half-hearted (pun intended because the old dude wears an artificial heart) sci fi about an old survivalist living with his daughter and her partner who accidentally steals the old man’s Alzheimer’s patient girlfriend while they’re all trying to live in a rapidly drying up world.

That’s also the only story that doesn’t have animals figure into themes of family, love, and protection that, though hard-won, are almost never strong enough to last. People leave and animals die and everybody wonders what they’re doing here.

I appreciate how the author doesn’t try to add substance by going needlessly artsy on the prose. She presents slices of not-quite-ordinary lives as they are; the thematic metaphors are there for readers who want them. That is either a good command of subtlety or boring, depending on how much you like cows.

I felt really cheated that there wasn’t at least one story about an owl, though. At this point, owls are shorthand for quirky on par with handlebar mustaches, so I never really know whether the picture means anything or not.