by Kenneth Oppel
Recommended Age: 10+
Now, when you think of bats - not baseball bats, but the little leathery winged things that flap around in the night - I'm sure you don't think to yourself, "Oooh, how cute!" But amazingly, Oppel manages to make friends between you, the reader, and his hero, a runty silverwing bat named Shade.

But after befriending a lonely brightwing bat named Marina, Shade (who thinks of himself as a bat of destiny) proves to be the hero of a very hairraising adventure in which he is threatened by pigeons, owls, wolves, rats, and (worst of all) two giant vampire bats escaped from a sort of zoo. These cannibalistic monsters want to manipulate Shade into leading them to his colony so they can feast on the hibernating silverwings all winter, then fly back to their rainforest. But Shade has some tricks up his sleeve too.

It is a gripping adventure, and unless you have an absolute, clinical phobia of bats, I think you will actually grow to love Shade and his friend Marina.
Sunwing
by Kenneth Oppel
Recommended Age: 10+
The sequel to Kenneth Oppel's Silverwing is even bigger and more exciting than its predecessor. It picks up pretty much where Silverwing left off. Shade, the runty silverwing bat, has developed some unusual but useful skills in using sonar to draw pictures in the minds of bats and owls. In the first book these skills only went as far as reading a mental map that his mother sang to him, and occasionally decoying a threatening owl or cannibal bat with a false echo. In this book his powers develop still further to creating elaborate illusions, a sonic cloak of invisibility, and even moving solid objects physically with the force of sound. I'm not talking about just making leaves shiver. I'm talking about picking locks and lifting heavy objects!

There's also a love triangle between Shade, Marina, and a strapping young silverwing named Chinook, who touchingly goes from being a swaggering bully who likes nothing more than pushing Shade around, to being a devoted and trusting follower of his hero Shade. Old characters return - Frieda the bat elder, Ariel (Shade's mother), Romulus the webbed rat (who is now king of the northern rats), even from a distance the albino seer-bat, Zephyr. New characters abound - the twisted vampire-bat high priest of the Aztec bat god, the Mexican rat General, the young owl Orestes, and a number of new and interesting bat characters.
And humans come in for a drubbing in this story, in which the threat of total war between owls and bats comes to a head just as humans are using both owls and bats as living bombs in a horrible war.

In all this peril, what can a little bat do - especially when he's questioning his own beliefs and bucking the opinion of everyone around him? There are exciting and perilous journeys, bizarre and interesting scenery, awful creatures (the giant insect that tries to eat Shade at one point, still makes my flesh crawl to think of it), feats of daring and friendship and interspecies understanding, moments of pure horror and gripping suspense, and of course, humor, charm, and romance too.
Firewing
by Kenneth Oppel
Recommended Age: 10+
The third, and apparently last, of Kenneth Oppel's Silverwing/Sunwing novels is a pretty gripping story, but I was a little disappointed at the ending. Not because it was badly written; it just wasn't the way I wanted it to end!

Unfortunately Shade's bitterest enemy, Goth the cannibalistic vampire bat, is now a resident of said Underworld and is also in on the underworld god's (Cama Zotz) bid to take over the world of the living. An opportunity to suck the life out of a living victim is rare enough, and vital to Zotz's evil plan; getting revenge on Shade is icing on the cake! So while Griffin, accompanied by his dead best friend Luna, flaps in search of a legendary tree that is a sort of gateway to the next life, and while Shade searches for him with the help of several other "pilgrim" bats, Goth is gunning for both of them with the supernatural aid of Cama Zotz.
There are also interesting obstacles along the way, such as a cactus that puts out vines that try to trap you, a cave that lulls you with a sense of well-being while the rock crystallizes around you, and

Griffin is a pretty adorable character too. It's a pity that between him and his father, only one of them can live through the tale. Which is the part I wish was different... but I suppose in a way, it's the right ending.
EDIT: I have been seriously snoozing at the switch! Last year Oppel came out with a fourth adventure in this series, titled Darkwing.
Airborn
by Kenneth Oppel
Recommended Age: 14+
The author of the Silverwing trilogy has brought back the age of swashbuckling in this award-winning book, soon to be a motion picture. Only the ships, sailors, and pirates in this adventure are riding, not the high seas, but the even higher skies above them.

But first, he has to rise above the rank of cabin boy. His big chance comes after his heroic actions in saving a sick old man in a sinking hot-air balloon. But the old man dies, raving about seeing some kind of wonderful winged creatures, and the promotion dies when a rich man’s son steals the position Matt has earned. The hardest thing about resenting Bruce Lunardi is that he’s really a decent fellow. And now Matt’s ability to cope with hard-to-please, rich passengers is stretched to the limit by the willful Miss Kate DeVries and her shrill chaperone.
But Matt’s problems have scarcely begun. Kate turns out to be the granddaughter of the dying balloonist, and her determination to see the mysterious creatures her grandfather wrote about can only mean trouble for Matt. Then a band of pirates swoops down in their sleek, black airship and bring pillage, murder, and shipwreck to the beloved Aurora. And then, after a crash-landing on a desert isle, just when it looks like everything is going to be OK,

At the center of it all is a resourceful, daring, active young hero whose fondest dreams and worst nightmares collide in the most interesting way. The grief he is trying not to feel, the love that he has for his ship, and the frankly shocking danger threatening everything he cares about are easy to feel as the story unfolds. At times, I felt horror and sadness as I read this book, but for the most part it was an exhilirating ride. I look forward to climbing aboard the sequel, Skybreaker.
Skybreaker
by Kenneth Oppel
Recommended Age: 14+
This sequel to Airborn finds Matt Cruse interning as a navigator’s assistant on a somewhat disreputable flying freighter. When the crew sights a legendary ghost-ship, rumored to have disappeared into the sky with loads of treasure, their attempt to salvage it nearly ends in calamity. Matt’s thanks for saving everyone’s life is to have his internship canceled and to be sent back to the airship officer academy in Paris.

But with partners in adventure comes romantic rivalry. On the one hand, there is the gypsy girl named Nadira whose magnetism Matt feels, even while he remains devoted to Kate. On the other hand, there is the handsome captain whose pressurized “skybreaker” is equipped for salvage operations at altitudes that would be fatal for most airship crews. Confused by his own feelings and desires, subdued by a sense of inferiority to the dashing captain and the wealthy girl,

Survival becomes a problem, first, because of the thinness and coldness of the air 20,000 feet above Antarctica. The problem grows more serious when the Hyperion is separated from Slater’s ship due to gusting winds. The arrival of a band of deadly pirates with their own skybreaker, and their own reasons to want Hyperion and her contents all to themselves, makes survival a pretty scanty prospect indeed. And topping it all is the discovery of a high-altitude, flying, giant-squidlike creature with high-voltage tentacles and an efficient method of stalking its prey. Even human prey.
As it turns out, Matt is valuable after all. His agility, fearlessness, and physical stamina make him the key to his friends’ survival. But between a shipful of pirates, a deadly squid thing, and the inherent dangers of spending time on a shipwreck drifting at the height of Mount Everest, saving his friends may be easier than saving himself. Prepare for a memorable, Icarus-like leap into the wide blue yonder, and a fight for survival that is really, literally, like none you have experienced before.

EDIT: Other titles by Oppel include the five A Bad Case of books (A Bad Case of Ghosts, etc.), Cosimo Cat, The Devil's Cure, this year's releases Dusk and The King's Taster, and a children's picture book titled Emma's Emu.
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