Sonderbooks Book Review of Owl in Love

Reviewed August 2001.
A Sonderbooks' Best Book of 2001
Puffin Books, 1993.
Available at Sembach Library (JF KIN).

Owl in Love is a fun and light-hearted novel. This book was recommended by Sandra Guy at the Paris Children’s Writer’s Conference last May. Then I read a new book by the author, Goose Chase, and was captivated. (Goose Chase, by the way, is a light-hearted retelling of a fairy tale with a spunky heroine. I read it to my boys, and they enjoyed it. It has the same flavor as Ella Enchanted, by Gail Carson Levine.)

Owl in Love is about a teenager who is a shape-shifter and spends her nights as an owl. Owl is in love with her science teacher, Mr. Lindstrom. She’s obsessed with him, and sits on a tree outside his room at night, watching him.

I had read reviews of this book and was a bit put off by the quoted first paragraph, where Owl mentions his underwear size. I needn’t have been. That’s as sexually suggestive as the book gets. This is a pretty innocent teenage crush, but owl’s dual being gives it interesting repercussions.

The book explores what it would be like to be a shape-shifter. Owl can’t eat a regular human diet, for if she does, she can’t fly. She has to avoid giving a drop of blood in science class, since her blood is black, not red, giving her skin a grayish tint. Finding someone else’s blood leads her to make her first friend.

This is a fun book with the theme of being different.

Reviews of other books by Patrice Kindl:
Lost in the Labyrinth
Keeping the Castle
A School for Brides

Book Reviews by Sondra Eklund

*****Owl in Love*

by Patrice Kindl