Guardians of Ga'Hoole: The First Collier by Kathryn Lasky.
Title: Guardians of Ga'Hoole: The First Collier.
Author: Kathryn Lasky.
Genre: Fiction, children's lit, YA, prequels, fantasy, adventure, animals.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: April 1, 2006.
Summary: A prequel to the series, as Soren and his nephew, the young king Coryn, read the oldest and greatest legend of the owl kingdom. It is a time of Legends and a time of chaos. Warlords vie for power and marauding outlaws roam the land. Good King Hrath and his queen, Siv, noble Spotted Owls, struggle to keep peace in their kingdom. Grank, friend and supporter of King Hrath, has exiled himself to Beyond the Beyond, where he has developed his fire-sight and learns how to work with embers and how to forge metals. He is the First Collier. Deep in a volcano in the farthest reaches of Beyond the Beyond, he discovers a magical Ember, while the kingdom from which he comes falls apart, with Grank as the only hope to race back to his friends and save the royal line.
My rating: 7.5/10.
My Review:
♥ "It brings great promise... and great danger. Ignorance is perhaps the source of all evil. Forget the battle claws, forget ice swords and ice daggers. Knowledge is the most powerful weapon of all. It is vitally important that you know how we came to be, the stories even older than the cantos, the legends of Ga'Hoole."
♥ From a time before time
when we gadfeathers roamed
o'er mountains, valleys, and sea,
We sought not a home,
not a limb for a perch,
we only wanted to be free.
Now the sky is our hollow,
the stars we do follow.
The wind is our friend.
That's all we need in the end;
To fly and rarely rest.
The whole word is our nest.
Let us be, let us be, let us be.
let us be free, free, free!
♥ My problem was trying to reason at all. I was caught between the evil magic of the hagsfiends and my own powerful magic. Reason is not a fulcrum for magic upon which decisions should be made. Nor is magic a fulcrum for reason. To mix logic with magic can be catastrophic.
♥ "I teach because I was taught."
♥ "Every wound a new opportunity, every curse a new challenge."
♥ She is the song in my heart,
she is the wind beneath my wing.
Her mercy knew no bounds,
her faith as deep as any sea.
She is everywhere I look,
yet she still is lost to me.
♥ Almost as soon as Theo departed I felt a loneliness as I had never before experienced. It was not a simple loneliness. It had weight.