Book Review: Owly: The Way Home & The Bittersweet Summer
Owly: The Way Home & The Bittersweet Summer by Andy Runton. Top Shelf Productions, 2004, 157 pages, $10, softcover, ISBN: 1-891830-62-7
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What could a graphic novel and bird watching possibly have in common? The answer is Owly: The Way Home and The Bittersweet Summer by Andy Runton. Meet Owly, an endearing, bird-watching strigidae whose passion is making friends and enjoying nature. Runton’s essentially textless novel crosses all literacy levels and engages readers with charming comic-strip ingenuity and a timeless storyline. In the first mini-story, The Way Home, Owly befriends a little lost worm (Wormy) and together, they find the way back to his parents. In The Bittersweet Summer, Owly learns the lesson that his hummingbird friends must leave to migrate south but that they return again in the spring. The stories are simple, but the vitality the illustrations generate is what makes this book a real page-turner.
Owly would be a wonderful book for an adult to share with a child and also great for reluctant readers. Runton, in a 2004 interview for SCOOP¸ explained that he first started drawing the owl character as a teen on notes that he left his mother. When it came time to work on his first comic, the typical superhero characters or storylines that evolved never felt as right as Owly. Besides Owly: The Way Home and The Bittersweet Summer, there are three other graphic novels featuring Owly currently in print, Owly: Flying Lessons, Owly: Splashin' Around, and Owly: Just a Little Blue. Runton also comments that, "Owly and Wormy are constantly on the look-out for new adventures."
With illustrations filled with details and the storylines timeless, all of the books from the Owly series offer endless reading potential Owly: The Way Home and The Bittersweet Summer is a joy for anyone interested in a great story about nature, birding, friendship, or hummingbird migration. Even down to the end papers, Owly is most definitely eye candy. Whether readers ultimately identify Owly as a great-horned, a long-eared, or a western screech, they're sure to find him their favorite graphic-novel owl.
– Andrea Wyman
Andrea Wyman is a faculty member at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. She enjoys backyard birding with daughters Olivia, Hannah, and Eve.
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