Guardians of Ga'Hoole: The Burning by Kathryn Lasky.
Title: Beyond Thirty (The Lost Continent).
Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Genre: Fiction, children's lit, YA, fantasy, adventure, animals.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2004.
Summary: Soren and his band are sent to the mysterious Northern Kingdoms to gather allies and learn the art of war in preparation for the coming cataclysmic battle against the sinister Pure Ones. Meanwhile, in the Southern Kingdoms, St. Aggies has fallen to the Pure Ones and they are using its resources to plan a final invasion of The Great Ga'Hoole Tree. With the future of all Owldom in the balance, the parliament of Ga'Hoole must decide whether or not to join forces with the brutal Skench and Sporn and the scattered remnants of St. Aggies who remain faithful to them. A great battle is on the horizon and it will end in The burning that will change all owldom forever.
My rating: 8/10.
♥ Gylfie began to think hard about vanity and mirrors. She and the rest of the band had had some experience with mirrors, and she knew that vanity deceived, and was not a strength but a weakness. Long ago, when Gylfie, Soren, Twilight and Digger had been on their long and arduous journey to find the Great Ga'Hoole Tree, it had been the Mirror Lakes in the region known as The Beaks that had nearly been their undoing. Transfixed by their own images reflected in the lakes' surfaces, the band had almost forgotten how to be owls. They had forgotten their purpose, their goals, and all that they had risked and nearly died for simply because they had fallen under the spell of vanity. If Mrs. Plithiver, Soren's old nest-maid snake from Tyto, had not been there and given them a blistering scolding, well, there was no telling what might have happened. Then a phrase came back to Gylfie from a book by Violet Strangetalon she had once read: The folly of vanity is the curse of the peacock, a nearly flightless bird, happy to remain so and to strut about for the admiration of earthbound creatures. Their appalling ostentation is equaled only by their appalling stupidity.