Name: Owl in Love
ISBN: 9780618439102

Patrice Kindl

Birds of prey have run in fourteen-year-old Owl Tycho's family for hundreds of years.Every generation or so produces a shape-shifter, an apparently normal human being who can change into an owl at will.

Owl in Love

Sarah Sammis

I bought Owl in Love by Patrice Kindl on a complete whim. It turns out to be the author's debut novel. In it, Owl Tycho, an owl "by name and by nature" spends her days as a teenage girl and her evenings as a barn owl (Tyto alba).

Her name is so similar to what she becomes, that one can just imagine the other characters in the book doing a double take whenever Owl is first introduced. Owl, though, has other obsessions — namely her science teacher who is more than twice her age. Why he intrigues her so is never fully explained, although Owl does try. The feeling, is thankfully, not mutual.

Things change when a mysterious boy appears — camping out in the teacher's backyard (how convenient). The boy, we are lead to believe, has similar talents and needs as Owl.

Where the book lost me though is in the spareness of character. Owl, in all her strangeness, is the most normal person in the entire book. Owl's human (but self-described witch) parents are less socially adjusted that she is.

Since I never managed to connect with Owl or the other characters, I didn't care to see how the book ended. Although I was only about thirty pages from completing the book, I decided to move on to something new.

Owl in Love

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