I think this book is hard to judge, because its obviously the first part of a larger story. In this first book we get a lot of setting and world building, but not a lot of plot.

The world of Ga'Hoole is interesting: talking birds, rites of passage, coming of age, rituals, traditions. Elements of our strange little bird society are slowly slotted into place over the coarse of this book. Unfortunately at time, this kind of made the experience a slog with what little plot we had. But the world building up around us is interesting enough to hold the readers attention, especially once you realize "oh this is just WW2 but for owls."

I had a lot of fun with this parallels once I realized it. Our two little owls are basically brought to a concentration camp and they have to escape. The morals of the story are rather black and white, which I'm okay with as this is pretty early middle grade reading. Its established really quickly who is the bad guys and who are the good guys. Speaking of, I do love our two main characters. We get to watch Soren grow literally from birth, which means we get to see every single step of his character development which I really enjoyed. And then Gylfie is such a spunky, spirited young lady. The two balance each other out very nicely.

From this first book, the setting is laid out for us and its obvious that there is the true, grander story waiting for us in the pages of the other books. Its caught my attention enough that I definitely think I'll pick up the next book.

Not my favorite talking animal book, but still worth a look: 3 out of 5