Empowering Bright & Gifted Children

 

Author: Kenneth Oppel

Grades: 3-7
Publisher Recommended Age: 8-12
Publisher: Simon Schuster
Book Type: 3 Book Set includes 3 Trade Paperback books

 

 

The Silverwing series features the adventurs of Shade, a fictional bat. When Shade Silverwing breaks an age-old law, looking at the sun, his home is burned to the ground by a group of owls. Then he is blown out to sea and makes a friend with a Brightwing, named Marina, who has a band on her arm.

 

They run into some strange bats. They meet Zephyr, a mystical albino with great hearing. They meet Goth and Throbb, two giant bats from the jungle, and they meet Scirocco, a bat intent on becoming human.

 

Shade will have to go through a test of willpower and strength if he ever wants to see his colony again.

 

 

 

Shade is a young silverwing bat, the runt of his colony. But he's determined to prove himself on the long, dangerous winter migration to Hibernaculum, millions of wingbeats to the south. During a fierce storm, he loses the others and soon faces the most incredible journey of his young life. Desperately searching for a way to rejoin his flock, Shade meets a remarkable cast of characters: Marina, a Brightwing bat with a strange metal band on her leg; Zephyr, a mystical albino bat with an unusual gift; and Goth, a gigantic carnivorous vampire bat. But which ones are friends and which ones are enemies? In this epic story of adventure and suspense, Shade is going to need all the help he can find -- if he hopes to ever see his family again.

 

Publishers Weekly: "...(compares) to Watership Down for the...use of animal characters in (an) investigation of tolerance, intellectual freedom and other social concerns. Ages 8-12.

School Library Journal: "...greatest strengths of this story...fast-paced, cliff-hanging action and its setting within the...bell towers of the bats' monochromatic nighttime world." Grades 4-6.

 

 

Shade, a young silverwing bat in search of his father, discovers a mysterious Human-made building containing a vast forest. Could his father be there? Home to thousands of bats, the indoor forest is warm as a summer night, teeming with insect food, and free from the tyranny of the deadly owls. But Shade and his friend Marina aren't so sure this is paradise. Shade has seen Humans enter the forest and take away hundreds of sleeping bats for an unknown purpose. And where is Shade's father?

 

School Library Journal: "Shade, a silverwing bat, and Marina, a brightwing, continue their search for Shade's father." Grades 4-8

ALA Booklist: "Action-packed and suspenseful."

 

 

The forest heaves and splits in a terrible quake, and Griffin, a newborn Silverwing bat, is sucked down a fissure deep into the earth. Shade, Griffin's father, soon realizes that his son has been drawn into the Underworld and embarks on the most dangerous of journeys to rescue him. Shade knows he must find Griffin quickly -- legend says that if the living stumble into the land of the dead, they have only a short time before death claims them, too. But something else is hunting Griffin -- a deadly foe Shade hoped he would never see again. Who will find Griffin first?

 

School Library Journal: "Plenty of rousing action; special effects on a grand scale; a leavening of humor (and) stimulating thoughts on the nature of life..." Grades 4-8.

Horn Book: "Fans of the first two books will find that this new adventure, with compelling geography and cosmology of the Underworld, takes them places Silverwing and Sunwing never dreamed of."

 

 

While a fifteen-year-old student, Kenneth Oppel wrote his first children's novel, Colin's Fantastic Video Adventure, which was published in 1985. After graduating from high school, Oppel attended the University of Toronto, where he studied English and film. In addition to more than a dozen books for children and young adults, Oppel also writes original screenplays, which have been optioned by producers in London, Toronto, and Hollywood. In 1995 he won the Air Canada Literary Award for "a writer under 30 who shows outstanding promise in the field of literary creation."

 

Oppel currently lives in Toronto with his wife, Philippa Sheppard, and their children, Sophia and Nathaniel.