Owl King

LoveReading Says

October 2025 Book of the Month

“For sisters, we were nothing alike, her features fine where mine were plain, her edges keen where mine were soft…but in one thing we were perfectly matched. Our love for each other”. And it’s this love and devotion that drives Owl King’s beautiful, brambled narrative.   

Being half-human, half-faery, Ilsette is an outcast in the Realm of Never Moon, a withered, once-lush dominion under the command of the Owl King. In contrast, her sister Lyla is entirely faery, and entirely beautiful, and it’s this beauty that sees Lyla forced to marry the Owl King. Without her sister, Ilsette is rendered rudderless: “I didn’t know how to exist in a world without my sister. She was my companion, my comfort, my compass. I relied on stories to guide me, and the truth was that as the storyteller, it was Lyla who set my path”. Then comes another devastating truth — the Owl King marries to feed off his current wife’s magic, casting them aside when they’ve been drained. And so Ilsette embarks on a dangerous, love-driven quest to find the feather that will save her sister.  

At the same time, Lyla does what she does best — she tells her captor stories — and in time, the Owl King and his captive bride become close. Meanwhile, Ilsette encounters multiple dangers while grappling with deep-rooted identity anguish: “I was so tired. Tired of hiding who I was, whether faery or human…What might it be like, I wondered, to be myself?”  

Occupying the same faery realm as Nettle, Owl King sees Bex Hogan share a time-stopping, timeless story of love and survival, nigh-impossible tasks and impossibly difficult truths, shot-though with the message that “stories will save you”, as Ilsette once counselled Lyla.

Joanne Owen

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