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Author: Kathryn Lasky
Pages: 222
Publisher: Scholastic
Related Books: The Journey, The Rescue, The Siege, The Shattering, The Burning, The Hatching, The Outcast, The First Collier, The Coming of Hoole, To Be a King, The Golden Tree, The River of Wind, Exile, The War of the Ember.

Summary:
Meet Soren, a young Barn owlet yet to get flight feathers. His life was good, listening to his parents stories of the Glauxian Knights and Hoole, along with his younger sister Eglantine... Until he finds himself falling out of his tree hollow.
And all too soon after that, he was scooped up into the claws of a strange owl and being taken out of his home forest.
Along the way, he meets Gylfie, a nearly fledge ready Elf owlet, also being carried by a strange owl to the desolate and barren canyons of St. Aegolius's Academy for Orphaned Owlets run by Skench, a Great Horned owl and Spoorn, Skench's second in command.
The two young owls very quickly learn the Academy is not what it appears, and has a dangerous purpose... Which, as they quickly find out, is to moon blink the owls, in which the owlets are forced to stand under the full moon with their heads fully exposed to the light of the moon, causing the owls to suffer a condition which destroys their personality and will.
Yet Soren and Gylfie quickly find a way around this conditioning, and begin to plan a way to escape, yet first they had to learn to fly...
It was during this time that they met Hortense, a barred owl small enough to be an owlet, who is in fact an infiltrator from outside the academy to rescue eggs that had been stolen by the Academy to increase the ranks..
Shortly before Soren and Gylfie had planned to leave, Hortense's role was discovered by Skench, as she was setting up another egg to be rescued, and, in the ensuing fight, Hortense was shoved over the edge of a cliff, and the egg was rescued by a bald eagle named Zan.
Because of this, they were no longer allowed access to the one place where their escape was easy, and had to find another way, which came in the form of a boreal owl named Grimble, who secretly taught the two to fly, and had ensured they could escape, at the cost of his own life...
After they had escaped, they encountered Twilight, a Great Gray owl who had been snatched by an Academy patrol and had managed to escape along the way, and was forced to learn how to fend for himself, making him very knowledgeable in many things related to places in the owl kingdoms, and had honed his fighting skills to a deadly level... On his way to find the Great Ga'Hoole tree of legend...
With Twilight's help and companionship, they find their way back to Soren's forest home, only to find it abandoned.
The three then set out to find Gylfie's home in the desert, yet as they traveled, they came across yet another owl orphaned by the Academy, a young Burrowing owl named Digger, who was searching for his own family, and joined Soren, Gylfie, and Twilight as they traveled.
It was as they searched the desert for Gylfie's and Digger's families that they were attacked by three owls from the academy. As they fought, two bald eagles joined the fray, quickly ending the fight and killing the three attackers.
It turns out the two eagles were friends with Hortense, and one of them was the eagle that had rescued the last egg that Hortense could save. The two also were on friendly terms with the burrowing owls of the desert as a family of them had cared for Zan after she had been injured.
It was during the aftermath of the fight that the four owls made a solemn pledge... to become a band in their search for the tree and to rely on each other no matter what...

Notes and Recommendations:
This being Lasky's first book in the series, I find it to be fairly well written, and easy to get into, drawing the imagination alive and into the world of owls and their lives.
This book definitly reminds me of the Warriors Series by Erin Hunter, yet instead of cats, it is with owls.