Kau akan terbang sampai ke Hoolemere. Kau telah bertahan dari serangan burung gagak.Kau telah terbang melintasi gurun. .... Kau akan terbang menembus angin, menembus cahaya...kau akan tetap terbang. Kau takkan gagal. Kau pasti bisa menyelesaikan perjalanan ini.Tujuan utama keempat sahabat Soren, Gylfie, Twilight dan Digger sudah jelas, mencari Pohon Ga'Hoole Agung Semuanya demi menciptakan keamanan dan ketentraman di dunia burung hantu. Ditemani oleh Mrs Plithiver, ular tua pelayan-sarang keluarga Saron, mereka menempuh perjalanan yang penuh dengan bahaya.Konon khabarnya Pohon Ga'Hoole Agung tidak bisa dilihat, karena tumbuh di suatu pulau di tengah Laut Hoolemere yang nyaris seluas samudra. Pohon itu selalu diselimuti kabut dan pulaunya selalu dilanda badai salju. Hanya mereka yang percaya yang bisa menemukannya. Apakah mereka berempat percaya?Keempat sahabat itu sempat mengalami kesukaran saat melewati Danau Cermin. Kondisi lingkungannya tidak terlalu baik bagi keempat sahabat itu Semuanya terasa mudah dan indah. Disaat tempat lain sudah berada di awal musim dingin, Danau Cermin tetap berada dalam kondisi musim panas. Dedaunan masih segar, rumpur masih subur, tanah juga masih hangat. Tempat itu bisa lebih berbahaya dari St Aggie! Namun sekali lagi Mrs Plithiver dengan kebijaksanaannya mampu membimbing Soren, Gylfie, Twilight dan Digger mengatasi masalah yang ada.Lolos dari Danau Cermin, mereka masih harus menghadapi bahaya yang lain. Saat terbang sayap mereka mulai membeku, belum lagi tujuan mereka yang melenceng jauh. Lalu ada...........Waduh sebaiknya saya berhenti disini saja, sebelum spoiler. Maklum, ceritanya kian mendebarkan, banyak kejadian yang tak terduga, seperti....... Aduh saya mulai lagi!Begini sajalah, sekedar bocoran, buku ini terbagi dalam 25 bab, yaitu : 1. Kepungan Burung gagak 2. Ditemani Burung Hantu Hitam 3. Twilight Pamer 4. Keluar! Keluar! 5. Danau Cermin 6. Celah Es 7. Sisi Lain Yonder 8. Malam Pertama ke Hari Pertama 9. Parlemen Burung hantu 10. Kebimbangan Twilight 11. Cakar Emas 12. Hukla, Hukla dan Harapan 13. Burung Yonder 14. Terbang Malam 15. Mengunjungi Bubo 16. Suara Dari Dalam Akar 17. Chaw Cuaca 18. Pilihan Mrs Plithiver 19. Mengunjungi Madame Plonk 20. Kebakaran! 21. ”Bara Dalam Paruhku” 22. Anak Burung Hantu 23. Akhirnya! 24. Mag Si Pedagang 25. Dalam Selimut MalamBisa kebayangkan bagaimana serunya buku ini. Oh, ya Yonder adalah sebutan ular buta untuk menjelaskan langit karena letaknya yang sangat jauh. Sedangkan Ryb ... duh mulai lagi deh saya spoiler. Cerita dalam buku ini terlalu seru untuk tidak dibagikan....!Secara keseluruhan, buku ini tetap semenarik buku pertamanya. Kisahnya kian membuat penasaran. Banyak ide-ide segar penulis yang dikembangkan menjadi sebuah cerita mendidik namun disuguhkan dengan cara yang menarik . Misalnya bagaimana mereka berempat belajar untuk selalu kompak dan bekerjasa sama, mereka diharapkan tetap rendah hati walau telah berhasil mengalahkan berbagai bahaya, mereka harus tetap tekun belajar jika ingin sukses. Adegan menghibur juga bisa kita temui. Saya ikut tertawa membayangkan mereka juga memiliki kepala asrama yang disegani, seakan manusia yahPada buku pertama, saya sempat merasa heran. Menurut cerita burung hantu makan ular. Lalu bagaimana bisa pelayanan-sarang keluarga Sharon adalah sekor ular? Bukannya sama saja menawarkan drii untuk dimakan? Ternyata dalam buku ini dijelaskan, bahwa memang burung hantu memakan ular, namun bukan ular yang buta. Karena ular buta adalah pelayan-sarang keluarga. Untuk sementara bisa menahan rasa penasaran saya.Kadang dalam membaca sebuah cerita bersambung, kita sering lupa siapa saja tokoh yang ada. Selain tokoh utama, tentunya ada tokoh-tokoh lain. Jangan khawatir, mulai dari halaman 298 -301 kita akan menemui catatan mengenai tokoh-tokoh yang ada dalam cerita. Lumayan untuk menyegarkan ingatan sehingga lebih bisa menikmati cerita.Namun untuk saat saya melihat pembatas buku yang diselipkan, entah kenapa saya lebih menyukai gambar yang ada dibandingkan gambar yang dipergunakan untuk cover. Padahal hanya ada perbedaan kecil saja. Namun ternyata, sebuah perbedaan kecil memberikan efek yang tidak sedikitSelain cerita yang menarik , ada beberapa hal yang membuat saya merekomendasikan buku ini. Pertama pemilihan font serta kerapatan huruf . Keduanya terasa nyaman di mata, sehingga mata tidak merasa lelah saat menyelesaikan buku ini .Lalu soal harga. Belakangan ini harga sebuah buku sering menjadi bahan pertimbangan utama dalam membeli. Alih-alih membeli, sering kali seseorang malah meminjam, padahal buku itu layak koleksi. Penerbit Kubika berani melakukan terobosan guna memanjakan pembacanya.Sejak melihat wajah mereka, saya langsung jatuh cinta. Kian pingin tahu seputar ” kehidupan” Soren, Gylfie, Twilight dan Digger, yanga katanya ada 150 jenis di seluruh dunia. Hebat.................! Iseng-iseng ngintip ke Mbah google menemukan http://nurcha.wordpress.com/2007/12/1... yang menyebutkan mengenai fakta-fakta khusus seputar burung hantu, misalnya: * Burung hantu kawin sekali seumur hidup. * Burung hantu ditemukan di semua benua kecuali di Antarctica. * Burung hantu betina lebih berat dan lebih besar dibanding dengan jantan dari jenis mereka. * Mata burung hantu tidak bergerak, meskipun demikian mereka memiliki penglihatan binokuler seperti manusia. Dan burung hantu tidak dapat berkedip, untuk melihat mangsanya mereka tidak melirik seperti manusia melainkan menggerakkan kepalanya untuk mengawasi pergerakan mangsanya * Burung hantu mempunyai tiga kelopak mata: Satu untuk mengejapkan, satu untuk tidur, dan satu untuk membersihkan mata. * Wajah mereka pipih seperti cakram dan berbulu, bentuk wajah yang seperti ini memungkinkan mereka untuk mengumpulkan dan memfokuskan gelombang bunyi sehingga membantu burung hantu untuk mendengar, bahkan untuk suara yang paling lirih sekalipun. * Beberapa burung hantu mempunyai satu telinga yang lebih tinggi dibanding lainnya, sehingga membuat mereka mampu mendengar lebih baik, sehingga membantu menunjukkan dengan tepat di mana mangsa mereka. * Bulu burung hantu dirancang untuk meredam bunyi selama penerbangan dan memungkinkan membuat mangsa mereka tidak kemana-mana alias tidak dapat kabur * Dalam dongeng di yunani kuno, burung hantu dipercaya sebagai symbol kebijaksanaan. Mata merekalah yang membuat mereka terlihat bijaksana.Meminjam kalimat ucapan alm Mbah Surip, I LOVE U FULL KUBIKA.Menunggu buku ketiga, PenyelamatanBuat yang mau iseng :http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_0Zb0...
Yeah.... so, I had hoped that the second book in the series would start to bring up my opinion of the story, but it didn't. I have a lot of complaints with this one.This is definitely written for the wrong audience.As I said previously, I really think this book suffers for its audience. There's a paradox in the subject matter; on the one hand, Lasky wants to deal with themes such as Stockholm Syndrome, cannibalism, and child soldiers, but at the same time, she has to write these themes so they're accessible to her audience... which, unfortunately, is elementary and middle school students.It's really ridiculous at times. One minute, the characters will be discussing cannibalism of children and even unhatched fetuses, and yet the next minute they'll be vowing to beat the "badbutts". Really? The cannibalistic badbutts?I can't place the subgenre. Are we talking straight anthropomorphism of owls? Or are we talking magical owls?At this point in the series, I can't tell if it's fantasy or just anthropomorphism. Are the owls just absurdly smart and humanized? They do, after all, have weapons, armies, kingdoms, and even a religion. Or is there some kind of magic going on? The problems with finding Ga'Hoole implies it; weather that causes people to fly past the Ga'Hoole tree without seeing it because they don't have clear hearts or whatever certainly screams of magic. But the reveal that flecks are science, not magic implies an effort to keep magical elements out of the story.As I'm writing this based on notes I took a few weeks ago, I have since read most of the later books. The owls are indeed magic, but more on that in later reviews.There are some very unfortunate racial undertones.Mrs. Plithiver makes me nauseous. She was kidnapped as a child and forced to serve Soren's family. In the present day, she is the family's exceptionally devoted nanny, and she has developed an intense reverence of owls and inexplicable hatred for other kinds of birds (at whom she spends at least a quarter of her lines launching what are obviously racial slurs). Not only is her character revoltingly reminiscent of mammy stereotypes, she's also exceptionally racist herself.So, where does her racism come from? Oh, that's simple. The main characters all have lines devoted to their hatred of other bird species. The narrative makes it astoundingly clear that owls are good, clean, and noble, and all other birds range from "comes close to owls" with eagles to "murderous scourge of the earth" with crows to "dumber than shit" with seagulls and puffins.And no one is ever offended by this in-story. The seagulls laugh uproariously at "wet pooper" jokes, the puffins are a source of self-depreciating humor, crows are straight-up Always Chaotic Evil serial killers with no redeeming qualities whatsoever, and even the characters who object to the offensive jokes (Otulissa, Baran) aren't upset that the jokes are prejudiced--just that they're crude and ignoble. Are you serious?Meanwhile, the "wet pooper" jokes make no fucking sense to begin with! In-universe, the owl's main justification for their species discrimination is that their digestive system is nice and clean, whereas all other birds leave shit lying around because they don't have owl's noble gizzards to enable yarping pellets. Except, you know, that's not true. All birds have gizzards, including those totally disgusting crows. And, for the record owls do excrete typical white bird droppings. So this is me calling you on your bullshit, oh noble Guardians.This could be pardonable as a cultural character flaw if not for one key element that isn't yet revealed in this book: the major enemies of the series are the Pure Ones. What's their evil, evil sin? Racism.Where are the people, and where is this supposed to take place?Or, as the birds call us, the "Others". The owls are show to admire if not revere us and the structures we left behind after we went extinct.Except... what happened? How did we go extinct? Did we just up and disappear? Whatever happened, it was cataclysmic enough that the best survivalist species ever was completely wiped out, but ever other common North American creature is still roaming the forests without the faintest hint of any evolution via natural selection.So apparently, we managed to cause an Apocalypse that left all of our buildings intact for thousands of subsequent years (bullshit, because stained glass and paintings in churches wouldn't last that long--and yet they appear in the story inside the crumbling stone buildings) and wiped out every single human and nothing else. Whatever Apocalypse that is, I would love to hear about it. All I've got is some kind of rapture event.Meanwhile, I can't tell where the heck Ga'Hoole is supposed to be. The region isn't remotely recognizable, and it changes from forest to desert to arctic in a relatively tiny land area. What gives? It's not like enough time has passed for the plates to shift significantly.*grumble* Normally, I wouldn't complain about something like that. It's a fantasy map--who cares if it's ambiguously placed, right? Except this is supposed to be a future of our world, so I'd like to see a future of our world, not some half-assed "it could be anywhere!" map that doesn't make any geographic sense.Why is Ga'Hoole a myth?The first book and part of this one builds Ga'Hoole up as this mysterious kingdom that hasn't been located in hundreds of years. It's so mysterious that most owls don't think it really exists....except a group of kids manage to find it with relatively little trouble, and the Guardians are incredibly active in the Southern kingdom. Day-in and day-out, the collier and weather chaws are flying into forest fires across the kingdom. The navigation and search-and-rescue chaws are routinely saving hatchlings, returning them to their parents if at all possible. (Meaning the parents would certainly know something was up, if not exactly what.) The rogue smiths across the kingdom are actively spying for the Guardians. So how does no one notice they're there, when they're everywhere!I just don't know what to do with this series.I really wanted to like it. And yet I'm finding myself wishing I hadn't wasted my time reading it. (It's fifteen books long; that's a lot of time I could have spent on other series!) I really can't understand how this series is as popular as it is.
What do You think about The Journey (2003)?
Soren, Gylfie, Digger and Twilight have become much more than best friends. They are in search of the legendary Great Ga'Hoole Tree together with Mrs. Plithiver who was Soren's blind nest maid snake. They have to let other owls know the dangers of St. Aggies. They feel the need to take up the mantle of Noble Knighthood of Ga'Hoole to protect other owls from a fate that they managed to escape. This not just about the journey to the tree but also the journey of friendship and how they compliment each others stregths and compensate for thier weaknesses. This is a good quick summer read.
—Annamarie
Setelah bertemu Digger, Soren dan kawan-kawan terbang menuju pohon Ga’Hoole Agung di siang hari. Lalu mereka diserang gerombolan burung gagak. Akhirnya mereka berhasil lolos meski salah satu sayap Digger terluka. Mereka sampai di lubang pohon cemara besar dan di sana Mrs Plithiver merawat luka Digger.Selesai beristirahat, mereka melanjutkan perjalanan melalui jalur Sungai Hoole. Tampak kepulan asap di tengah hutan yang membumbung ke atas. Mereka mendatanginya, dan setelah sampai di depan mulut gua sebagai pusat kebakaran mereka melihat seekor kucing hutan. Dengan cepat mereka berusaha membunuh kucing itu. Penasaran melihat gua tadi, mereka pun memasukinya, dan menjumpai seekor burung hantu berbintik yang sekarat. Soren bertanya, “Apakah mereka menginginkan Cakar Perang? Apakah mereka dari St Aggie?” Tapi burung hantu berbintik itu menjawab, “Mereka lebih mengerikan dari St Aggie… Oh! Seandainya saja…”. Lalu burung itu pun mati.Mereka pun melanjutkan perjalanan dan sampai di Danau Cermin. Tempat itu menyenangkan sehingga keempat burung hantu itu bermalas-malasan. Tapi berbeda dengan Mrs P yang cemas dengan keadaan ini sehingga ia mengajak mereka melanjutkan perjalanan meski menghadapi hujan dan angin salju. Lalu mereka sampai di Kerajaan Utara dan ini berarti telah melewati Pohon Ga’Hoole Agung yang berada sebelum Kerajaan Utara di tengah Laut Ga’Hoolemare. Mereka terbang berputar kembali dan sampai di Pohon Ga’Hoole Agung.Di sana mereka mengalami kehidupan bersekolah di chaw masing-masing. Ketika Digger mencari korban anak burung hantu yang tersesat dalam tugas chaw-nya, dia melihat burung hantu yang mirip Soren. Ternyata itu memang adik Soren, Eglantine. Tapi Eglantine seperti tidak mengingat kakaknya. Hal itu lebih dari sekadar pembingungan di St Aggie. Namun setelah Madame Plonk menyanyikan lagu pengantar tidur akhirnya Eglantine pun tersadar. Dia hidup seperti biasa lagi. Mentari mulai muncul dan mereka tidur.Membaca buku ini buat saya menarik sekali. Ceritanya juga dapat menginspirasi kehidupan saya. Burung hantunya unik-unik. Saya juga bisa mengambil banyak hikmah dalam cerita ini. Selain itu saya juga jadi tertarik dengan makhluk hidup yang bernama burung hantu :p
—Ahfie Rofi
This book was a bit less interesting then what I assumed it was going to be but it was a good book. Although the random part where Eglantine randomly snaps out of the trance she was in went really fast. She didn't even question why she was at the Great Ga'hoole tree. After all she did have a case of gizzlemia so she couldn't feel anything. I feel like the author just figured that since it was near the end of the book, she had to rush the ending and make it really short. I have read the books after this book, so I know what happens. What I wonder is that, the three puffins, are they the same puffins that Faolan and the pack met in the author's other series Wolves of the Beyond? I know that the two series take place in the same time and place but by a different animal. Faolan did meet Dumpy, Dumpette, and I forget the other name. Although they met them in a different place. That time, they met them on the ice bridge, this time they met them in the ice narrows. The author did say that every puffin names their children with at least the word dump in it. Both series involve magical rips in time, it might be just coincidence but it's something worth thinking about.
—Karen Huang
