Rating: 
Summary: very very strange...
Review: Definitely NOT a book for most children. I read THE OWL SERVICE many years ago in part because I had enjoyed Garner's earlier books so much. I remember having nightmares afterwards, and steered clear of it subsequently. At the same time, the book stuck with me, and when I saw it in a used book shop a while ago I picked it up and re-read it. Second time through it is captivating, haunting, disturbing, and yes, very very strange. perhaps the perfect book to curl up with on a rainy autumn afternoon and find oneself going somewhere where the real and the possible somehow get turned inside out and we end... I am not sure where. I'd be reluctant to give this to other than a very mature child, but if you have one, he or she may well be entranced. I know I am.
Rating: 
Summary: Good but needed another few chapters!
Review: I decided to read this book after seeing it in a college syllabus and reading the reviews here. Since most people here either loved or hated it, I thought I'd add a more balanced review. First, I get it, mostly, and I'm not familiar with that parituclar Welsh myth. You do have to read it carefully to catch the subtext, and I agree that the Alison character, who should be the strongest, is the weakest. Blame it on the time when the book was written, when female characters were traditionally not well worked out.
On the plus side, the story is well-told, pulling the reader along in order to figure out what will happen. The language is also quite evocative, creating a mood much better than relating a narrative. The character of Gwyn is the best worked out, having more substance than either Alison or Roger, who are more superficial. Both Nancy and Huw show why Gwyn is pulled in two directions, the first rejecting what the valley stands for and the second binding him to it. In many ways his story was more interesting than the ancient legend brought to life.
However, there are a number of shortcomings of the book that I'm not willing to attribute to the obvious desire of the author to be ambiguous. First, there are a number of plot devices that are not resolved. What was the scratching in the attic? Why was Alison pulled in the beginning to owls instead of flowers (there was no struggle here at all, until the end)? Why was it the woman in the myth that was punished, when she was a minor player in the struggle? How did these three teenagers, who were not caught in a love triangle but rather a class struggle, come to embody the ancient themes? And why did the villagers seem to think that these events were a rarity, when the most recent enactment of them happened only a few decades ago?
Second, the ending was, I agree, deeply unsatisfying. After a whole portentious book, the whole thing was resolved in a paragraph, with seemingly no effort of will. How did Roger come to the conclusion that he did? Somehow it should have been harder, after detroying presumably countless lives since the original events, to end the cycle.
Still, it is a hauntingly written book, and memorable in that regard. I suppose it's a plus in the end that I wanted to know more!
Rating: 
Summary: Can somebody tell me what's going on?
Review: I don't agree with the other reviews when they gave five stars for The Owl Service. The cover and the back of the book looked interesting, so I picked it up at the library and started to read. The next thing I know, I'm lost in the book, trying to figure out if I skipped a page or something. The book was really confusing and didn't really make any sense at all by the end. The myth about the love triangle was really weird and perplexing, and it's hard to figure out how that event is reanacting itself all over again with Alison, Roger, and Gwyn. Also, that whole ending with the flowers and everything... it's beyond my comprehension and probably some others too.
Rating: 
Summary: The Owl Service serves up awesomely
Review: I first read this book almost 30 years ago, when I was about 11 or 12, and, much like another good book I've reviewed here, Shadow Castle, Alan Garner's The Owl Service has stayed with me. It's an amazingly sophisticated read for youth fiction. It was this book that lead me to further explore ancient British mythology (check out Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood series of novels). The characters are sharply drawn and feel real, and the story itself is so intriguing. I highly recommend.
Rating:
Summary: Deep. Grows on you.
Review: I had to read the book twice to really get it. But after that, I understood and liked the book immensely. It is a melding of ancient and bloody Welsh myth and our own imperfect unjust reality. Frightful but good.
Rating: 
Summary: Awful!
Review: I liked the mystery and aura this book started off with, but the ending was disappointing and didn't deserve the wonderful build-up to the story. The proof of this is the way Gwyn was filling out the prophesy the way they thought it was and then suddenly Roger bursts in and says,"Flowers!" and the story crashes down around the ending. I detested this ending!
Rating:
Summary: Favorite book by a favorite author.
Review: I love Alan Garner's books. His amalgam of ancient myth and topical fantasy always fascinates me-- and this one the most of all.Other reviewers have captured the plot line perfectly, so I'll not repeat that here. I would like to point out one aspect of the book that no one else seems to have noticed-- the symbolism. Alison is a girl on the cusp of puberty. When a girl is that age, one always begins to wonder how she's going to turn out. Is the emerging surge toward independence and autonomy going to take over and turn her into something cruel and horrific, or will she grow beyond that to mature into something beautiful and wise, if still perhaps slightly scary. OR-- to put it in terms of this book's central question-- will she come out 'feathers or flowers'? The hidden portrait in this book that forces itself on people, causing them to discover and notice it, is the perfect parallel to the emerging character of Alison. When the book begins she is still a little girl. By the end, she isn't. And the ending [which I won't give away] is symbolic of which way she'll go as an adult. As to some of the reviews on this site written by young readers who fail to understand what the book is about, I can only say that here is further proof that learning to 'read' is no guarantee of literacy, sad to say. Kids who actually know how to understand what they read, including my own two, love this book and aren't put off at all by its unusual and enigmatic style. In this case, to paraphrase Marshall Macluhan, the mystery IS the message.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful
Review: I read The Owl Service when I was in 7th grade and didn't fully understand it even though it was enjoyable. I read it later and think it is one of the most beautiful books I've read. The end is mysterious but that is keeping with the style of the book.
Rating:
Summary: I'm confused....
Review: I realize it might just be that I'm a numbskull, but I find it confusing when characters enter the scene, but the fact that they entered isn't mentioned, so you don't know they are there until they start talking. It also was confusing when the scene would suddenly change but the author wouldn't take the time to mention it, and I found it especially annoying when one of the characters would start thinking but it wasn't in quotes or italicized or even have the words 'he thought' after it/. They did this the whole book through. The characters were also disturbing. I couldn't relate to a single one of them, and actually hated most of them: Alison for being a complete cream puff, Roger for being rude and nasty, and Gwyn because he was annoying. The others were annoying too, ESPECIALLY Nancy, because none of them (including the aforementioned characters) appeared to have any motives whatsoever. For instance, Alison really doesn't want to upset her mother, but as far as I could see there wasn't a reason. The characters spent their time running around like chickens with no heads, confusing the reader further in a book that doesn't have a plot anyway. The plot was, in my opinion, the worst thing about the book. First of all, there WASN'T a plot. Everything that happened seemed totally disconnected to everything else. In particular, I didn't see how Gwyn and Roger and Alison were anything like the people in that story. Events that were never explained happened for no reason: the plates going blank, the owls sliding into that locked room, Alison going into the woods in the night, and any number of other things. It was so bad that he needs to write another book explaining this one. Not that I would ever read that book, because this one was HORRIBLE.
Rating:
Summary: oh brother...(This is not a hoot.heh heh heh hehh.eh..)
Review: I tried to see this book through.I really did.I wanted to finish what I started.I don't know if Garner has a genius mind,or a nutty one,but-whatever the case-I couldn't wrap my own head around it.Maybe if I hadn't been so bored,I'd have tried harder.But there was no way I would finish this weird thing,or buy another Alan Garner book.I used to read Shakespeare and it made more sense.All I can really tell you about the...um,plot..is that there were some plates and they had something to do with a girl who wanted to be a flower and hated owls.I don't know.Perhaps this novel is a work of brilliance in it's own way but not one I'm interested in.I would only recommend the novel to super-intelligents and /or extremely avid readers.It is not easy entertainment.
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