This books is entirely different from other shapeshifter-stories. Owl, the fourteen-year-old heroine, is really more bird of prey than human girl. She has black blood and therefore greyish skin, a heart-shaped face featuring large yellow eyes and feathery hair ending in a widow's peak. She does not eat human food, because she cannot digest it without losing her dual nature (after trying a sandwich she was not able to take off for days). Instead she hunts at night and eats yummy rats, mice and hamsters before going to school. Her house is always dark and devoid of furniture and electricity (better for practicing to fly) and her parents are otherworldly wizards, who have no clue about human lifestyle whatsoever and live on what they grow in the garden, what they find in dumpsters and what people pay them for witchy remedies. I suppose these parents are one means of providing hilarious moments throughout the novel, but today was one of those days on which parents of the clueless and irrational kind drive me nuts. I've read on the cover that Owl's infatuation with her fortyish sweaty-armpits science teacher will be replaced by an attraction for someone more suitable in age amd thus will make the story speedily more interesting, but I presently don't have the patience to find out if that is true. Besides, there are lots of promising books beckoning me to read them NOW. That seals the fate of my paperback.
