The Woman in the Wall

By Patrice Kindl.

Wonderful. This book contains all the humor of Owl in Love but at the same time is concerned with a more serious theme: shyness and hiding from the world. Young Anna is so unremarkable that, when her mother calls a guidance counselor to the house to prepare her to enter school, Anna ends up getting carried away in the woman's purse. This invisibility is the only possible fantasy element.

Well, that, and the fact that a seven-year-old taught herself to use power tools and proceeds, in light of the aforementioned traumatic experience, to wall off for herself a private section of the house. She takes a few feet here and there from every room, and her mother and sisters never exactly notice. In time, they seem to have forgotten that she ever really existed and wasn't just a make-believe tale.

Definitely a wonderful book.

Owl in Love

By Patrice Kindl.

Greatly entertaining. I laughed almost the whole way through this. Owl Tycho, our narrator, is a young high school girl who is infatuated with her science teacher. The difference is, she perches on a branch outside his house at night... as an owl. She blithely says ridiculous things. She is very quiet, but perhaps not quite as serious as her demeanor suggests: "You may think I have been blind or foolish about some of the events that have taken place within these pages, but I am not that big a fool."

Fairly short, but comic gold. Read it on a rainy day? Or maybe a train or bus ride, if you feel like explaining to the other passengers why you're laughing so hard.