The Owls Have Come To Take Us Away
by Ronald L. Smith
Clarion Books, 2019. 216 pages.
Review written October 27, 2019, from a library book
I love the title of this book, so nicely sinister. You might not want to give it to a kid prone to nightmares, or a kid prone to conspiracy theories.
This book tells the story of Simon, a 13-year-old who is obsessed by aliens – who then has encounters with aliens – or at least he thinks so. When they abduct him, what he remembers is looking into the eyes of an owl.
Simon does the right things and tells his parents – but they don’t believe him. They have him see a psychiatrist, who puts him on medication.
Simon lives on a military base, and his father is in the Air Force and especially skeptical of his story. But Simon meets some people who believe him, though their theories aren’t particularly comforting.
I did think that the book ended just when things got the most interesting.
One other objection is that Simon is writing a fantasy book – and we get to read the beginning chapters of this book. The author realistically shows us a book such as a 13-year-old would write – and I would rather not spend my time reading a fantasy tale written by a 13-year-old. It was a little bit hard to follow, too, so each time Simon gives us a new installment, he summarizes what went before. Each time that happened, I wished he’d summarized in the first place and not made us read the whole thing. The summaries worked just fine.
That said, the book still kept me reading. I’d like to hear what happens next, and not a hundred years in the future, either. But if the aliens are coming, I found it easy to believe this is what that would look like. Simon searched on the internet for insight on what was happening to him – I would not be surprised if a reader could replicate those searches.
strangeblackflowers.com
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