#kenneth oppel

[northern-ghost-13]

my own shade design!

[king-mera]

Checking the #silverwing tag is so frustrating. Get these Game of Thrones bitches out of the way, I'm looking for cartoon bats from 2003!!!

[haveyouseenthisseries-poll]

[coyotemolar]

[wildchild-11]

Own character in Silverwing version

[eekonis]

*throws bats at you*

[chaoskirin]

Book Review--Silverwing by Kenneth Oppel

I always read the reviews before buying a book, but I knew I was going to get this series anyway. I LOVE bats.

I need to put the "bad" first for this, because the rest of my review is glowing. This is a deviation from my norm, but if anyone's started reading the first few pages and thought, "Oh. No." I want to encourage you to KEEP READING.

So the reason I almost put it down after a couple pages because the beginning really doesn't catch my interest as much as it probably should. It seems like it's going to be a rivalry between Big Strong Bat Kid and Little Runt Bat Kid, and while the characters were supposed to be children, the author sort of used stereotypical child interactions, I guess is how I put it. The rival character is named Chinook, which I dislike. It's not really a great idea to name your characters after Native American nations, especially one that's been so repeatedly shafted by the American government. So I have to take points off for that.

In any case, Chinook has a lot of lackeys, one especially, that pretty much kowtows to everything he says. I can't remember lackey's name, though, because thankfully he disappears after the first chapter and is never heard from again.

Interactions after that are MUCH more natural, and I truly enjoyed reading the entire rest of the book. The main character, Shade, is a "newborn," which just means he was born that year. He is capable and decent at hunting, but is slightly naive due to his youth. This is played with wonderfully in the story, and is even mentioned in relation to the other main character, Marina, who is a year (or two, perhaps) older then him. She knows more, and he even calls her a know-it-all in his meta at one point because of her larger span of knowledge.

This story also doesn't treat adult characters as idiots who have to capitulate to the limited knowledge of their own children. Shade has some role models, including Frieda, the elder of his colony, and his mother, Ariel. As well as a mysterious white bat named Zephyr, who has special abilities that have come with blindness and age.

The plot, in summary, is that Shade wants to see the sun, which is forbidden for bats because of their lack of taking a side in an ancient war. The owls patrol the dawn and dusk for any bats who haven't roosted, and are entitled to kill them to maintain the law. When an owl catches Shade out as the sun rises, the king of the owls demands that his colony give him up so he can be killed. That's sort of another problem I have with the book--adult characters of other species (owls/pigeons/etc) have no compulsion to give children any sort of break. It's EXTREMELY cold-hearted, but I can't really take any points off for that. I'm not going to spell out exactly why here, but we've seen the worst in people lately, and I can't really fault the author for discussing things that are happening, for real, in 2023.

Anyway, the colony refuses to give Shade up, despite the protestations of another bat elder, and this starts a war with the owls.

When Shade gets separated from his mother, he has to find his way to a place called the Hibernaculum, but he's not on his own. He meets another young bat, whom I previously mentioned, named Marina.

They also meet the trilogy-long villain, a meat-eating bat named Goth. Goth is a killer, and the actions of him and his lackey, Throbb, mean I find this book a little inappropriate for younger children. I would personally bump the age rating up to 5th grade at the earliest. He's a killer, and has no qualms about dispatching anyone who gets in his way--as well as keeping those alive who are still useful to him. He's an extremely effective villain.

I do want to note here that one other reviewer was like "bats can't do _" and I want to remind everyone that this is a fantasy world. No continents are named--only places--and the animals have been in an uneasy truce for millions of years after a devastating war. They are intelligent, capable, and interesting. I would love to see more worldbuilding, but the amount we got was plenty for me to be able to understand that this takes place on an alternate, fantastical version of earth.

Without posting any spoilers, I can say that the end of the book is satisfying and pretty awesome, and I really couldn't wait until even the next night to start reading it. I immediately opened book 2 (Sunwing) to see what happened next. This review is just for book 1, though, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I can only take one star off for the beginning and the use of Chinook as a name, but I highly recommend this to both appropriately-aged kids and adults.

[flittermousing]

There it is again, that funny feeling

[kidlit-queen-competition]

Qualifier: Kenneth Oppel

[haveyoureadthisfantasybook]

vote yes if you have finished the entire book.

vote no if you have not finished the entire book.

(faq · submit a book)

[daphnesilverwing]

New stuff, yay lol. I was working on the sketch of this foreverrr

I wanted to draw Murk because I love him, he's so sweet! Underrated guy. Also, I wanted to draw Shade because duh but also because I thought it would be interesting to draw the glow.

[lavinaigrette]

One of the niche adaptational choices that has haunted me for over a decade is the Silverwing animated series’ decision to make Goth and Throbb brother-in-laws. It’s just so random.

[cl0-ud1]

ALRIGHT i see a bunch of kenneth oppel stuff on here but no one talks about the overthrown trilogy.

I (personally) HATE ESTA. i’m sorry but i just do not like her, i have a hate club (with just me) dedicated to esta, i hate that stupid fucking bird lady.

i see seth and petra as very close friends and esta ruins their dynamic because SOMEONE DECIDES TO FUCKING RUN AWAY WITH A GIRL THEY JUST MET *cough cough* SETH *cough cough*

also, personally, darren was cool. aside from what happened, he was cool…

[foxqlove-draws]

ESTA TIME ESTA TIME FUCK YEAH WORST BIRD

SPOILERS FOR THRIVE

[juliapawshine]

Luna and Griffin book Firewing

[chaoskirin]

Book Review--Darkwing by Kenneth Oppel

OK, I have to start by saying this was another can't-put-down book, but unfortunately... I have a biology degree. And have a special interest in the era generally discussed in this book, the K-Pg extinction. (Not the C-T extinction as the description says. AFAIK, there was no extinction event called the C-T extinction, although the K-Pg extinction used to be called the K-T extinction.)

What I really wish is that this book would have leaned into its fantasy elements as the author had done with the first three books. I needed some suspension of disbelief. The interference of a god. Maybe the intervention of mystics or shaman. Something to make the events of this book make sense in its context. But this book was very much presented as an EXTREMELY low fantasy tale, and sort of sidelined into the talking animal trope with no fantasy elements. But I'm getting a little ahead of myself.

So I'll go into what I really liked about the book first.

To make a quick summary of the plot, the dinosaurs are in their death throes and other animals are inheriting the earth. The animals made a pact to destroy the last of all saurian eggs whenever they were found to hasten their extinction, but a group of pre-bats (which the authors called chiropters) decided they didn't want to do that because it was morally wrong. The other chiropters resent this group for making that decision and they have been banished. The plot expands from there.

So... Oppel knows how to tell a story. Like I said earlier, this book was extremely compelling and kept me reading because I did truly care about the characters. I had feelings over them, got in their heads, and generally liked them all--even the characters presented as villains. The main character, Dusk, is a chiropter who was born much different than others; it turns out, he can fly, and find his way in the dark. His story parallels an early felid named Carnassial, who has discovered he has a taste for meat and is different than the others in his pride (called a prowl in the book) which only eat bugs.

I didn't love the unspoken lack of morality Oppel assigned to Carnassial, and would have liked to have seen this predatory switch be more honorable (which still would have made him an effective villain to the other characters), but meat eating was generally presented as an act of savagery rather than survival. This switch to meat eating was also scientifically problematic, but I'll get more into that in a bit.

I know I seem really hard on the book, but like I said, I could not stop reading it. I stayed up all night to finish it, despite my better judgement. Because I cared about Dusk, and I wanted to see him succeed. I wanted to see him find a place he belonged. And therein lies the importance of writing sympathetic characters. I kept reading because I liked him. I also liked his sister, Sylph, and his father Icaron. Some of the side characters were also enjoyable, and I understood the foil, Nova's, role in the story. Nova had come to shift her ways of thinking over time, and did not like Icaron, who was the leader of the hero group of chiropters.

But...

There are so many issues with the book, starting with the lack of fantastical elements. According to the author, this is supposed to be a fantasy world. And just introducing SOMETHING--magic, gods, anything--in Darkwing would have made 90% of my problems with the science just go away. I would have given the book 4 stars. But these fantasy elements are completely absent, save for a moment where Dusk licks a mushroom and has a terrible trip wherein he hears a voice (possibly Nocturna???) tell him that he's new. It's never outright stated. Had Oppel done so and leaned into the canonical existence of gods, so much more would have made sense. Instead, this can literally be written off as a drug-induced dream. In a children's book.

And now we can get into the problems this leads to when it comes to science.

A quick primer on evolution: it happens over millions of years through natural selection. Let's say a group of pre-bats occasionally produces young with stronger chest muscles. This is a natural variable in the lives of these creatures, and generally does not affect them in a positive or negative way. But as the environment changes over time, pre-bats born with stronger chest muscles are able to stay aloft longer and avoid predators more successfully. Which means those individuals are the ones left alive to breed. Other adaptations may follow. Less fur on the wings makes individuals more aerodynamic, and more of them survive.

Over hundreds of thousands of years, this trait is selected for within specific environments, and eventually this species is no longer similar to its parent species. Should they encounter each other (because the parent species might still survive in environments suited to it) they would no longer be able to interbreed, due to mutations in genetics. But you would have two related species--one with weaker chest muscles and furred wings, and one with strong chest muscles and bare wings.

The way evolution is presented in Darkwing is that every once in a while, a bat is born from chiropters. Dusk isn't like his fellows, who have weak chests, three claws on their wings, the inability to flap/fly, and the inability to truly echolocate. Later in the book, (view spoiler)

It's just. Not how evolution works. It isn't even a simplified version of how evolution works. And this continued to bother me, because all Oppel would have had to say is that the goddess, Nocturna, selected certain individuals to become Something New (tm) and it would have been FINE.

Likewise, as long as there have been creatures on earth, there have been predators. Obligate carnivores. Things that cannot survive eating berries and roots and must have a protein-rich diet with the vitamins that can only come from meat. This is niche-filling and promotes a healthy food web. If you're curious as to how carnivores can effect entire ecosystems, look no further than the effect the reintroduction of wolves had on Yellowstone... A phenomenon that surprised even scientists. From the very beginning, there were simple eukaryotes which ate plant cells, and those which ate OTHER eukaryotes. This maintained a balance in any given ecosystem and caused it to thrive.

So for the author to write that no beast would ever eat another beast and then have one particular character just decide he wanted meat... It was a little unbelievable. Evolution drives predation. Necessity drives predation. Again, this could have been solved by a god or goddess flipping a switch in the minds of some of the animals of the world. It would have been awesome for a higher power to note that populations were increasing to unsustainable levels and cause some animals to become predators. But in the book, this change is instead presented as a natural occurrence. I didn't like it.

Beyond the science, this book had absolutely NO levity. While this presented constant action, the inability for my brain to rest between chapters actually made me more tired reading it. I am a firm believer that even the most action-oriented books need to leave space for their readers to breathe. A place where I can put down the book without thinking about picking it back up again. Not only was it constant action, but it was also CONSTANTLY dumping on the main characters and they never had any good luck. Whether they were being predated or attacked by birds, it never let up. They were constantly harried, and I'm surprised they didn't all have heart attacks from the stress.

Even with all that, I STILL have to recommend this book, as long as you have no issues with hand-waving some pretty solid scientific theories. It's a good story, and it's a fun read.