People ask me whether the child Chouette is meant to represent an autistic child, or a trans child, or an autistic trans child. The book is fiction. The child in the novel is an owl. She is no ordinary run-of-the-mill owl, though. She is a glorious mythological owl-monster known as a Strix. She is a man-eating apex predator, born into a suburban world that can't begin to accommodate her needs.
In my mind Chouette is slightly more bloodthirsty than her mother Tiny lets on in the pages of this book. What Tiny doesn't tell you is that by the end of the novel her daughter is happily hunting and feasting on human babies in the night, stealing them from their cribs. That's what Strix do.
Chouette's Strix nature means she is continuously treated as less-than: ostracized by other children, labeled a dangerous social deviant by her community, and subjected to invasive medical procedures by a father who blindly hopes through the power of science to erase his daughter's subtle differences from the other girls. Naturally Chouette fights back.
Chouette's mother Tiny is autistic. She might also be part-owl herself. I'm not sure. She might be some other kind of bird.
