By Kathryn Lasky
A barn owl too young to fly is shoved out of his nest and locked in an orphanage that marches owlets under the moon until they forget their own names.
Soren is a barn owl, still downy, still a few weeks off flying, living in a hollow with his parents and his little sister Eglantine. His older brother Kludd shoves him off the branch. Before his parents can find him on the forest floor, patrol owls snatch him up and carry him to a canyon called St. Aegolius Academy for Orphaned Owls. It is not an orphanage. The owlets there are marched in circles under the full moon, over and over, until they stop asking about their parents and answer to a number instead of a name. Soren figures out how to fake it. So does a tiny elf owl named Gylfie. The two of them hide their minds, teach each other to fly in secret at night, and start planning a way over the canyon wall.
What a Warriors reader is actually hooked on is a society of animals that runs itself — its own laws, its own ranks, its own words for things, its own religion. Lasky builds one every bit as complete as Erin Hunter's. Owls here have a gizzard, which is where they keep their feelings, and hireing, and churring for laughter, and your child will be using those words at dinner within a week. The difference is the shape of the story. This isn't a clan at war with the clan across the river. It's a prison break, and the thing Soren is fighting for is the inside of his own head. There are fifteen books behind it.