About the Author

Kenneth Oppel is a Canadian born author from Port Alberni in British Columbia. He spent most of his childhood growing up in Victoria (BC) and Halafax (Nova Scotia). At the age of 12 he decided he wanted to be a writer, an began writing little Sci-Fi stories, which he refered to as his "Star Wars phase", then shifted to writing more about swords an sorcery, which he refered to as his "Dungeons and Dragons phase". Durring the summer when he was 14, he wrote a humorous story about a boy addicted to video games, which he had based off himself. One of his family friends knew his favourite author Ronald Dahl, and they showed Dahl his story. His agent enjoyed the story so much, that he offered to get his book published for him, and take him on as a writer, and they did. His first book was publish in 1985 as "Colin's Fantastic Video Adventure", and was released in Canada, Britian, and the U.S, and later in France. It was what gave him the confidence that he could make writting his career. Later, he graduated from the University of Toronto with a double majour in Cinema studies and English, and wrote his second childrens novel, "The Live-Forever Machine" in his final year. He got married the year after he graduated from school to Philippa Sheppard, whom has an Oxford PhD and is a Shakespearean scholar. They moved to Toronto after about 3 years where they now live with their 3 children. Since the start of his writting career in 1985, he wrote a total of 27 books in 28 years. In my opinion, Kenneth Oppal is turely an amazing writer, and has won a tramendous amount of awards such as the 2004 Governor General's Award for children's literature for the book "Airborn", the Canadian Library Association's Book of the year for children award for his book "Half Brother" and has sold millions of books world wide, which includes selling over a million copies of the book "Silverwing" around the world !

About the Story

Long ago, there was a great war between the beasts of the land and the birds of the air. Because the bats shared aspects of both sides, they chose to stay neutral in the conflict. For that, both sides banished the Bats to the night, never to see the Sun again. Now, in the present time, the story is about a Silverwing bat named Shade. Shade feels neglected by his peers and other bats living at the colony with him because he is much smaller then all the other bats, and is known as "The Runt". Shades colony consisted of only the mother bats, and all their children. All the male bats stayed at a different place for the fall, while the females went to the Tree Haven for the fall to have their babies. Within Shade's colony, they had a law that refused bats from seeing the Sun. However, Shade was intreeged by the sun, ans was very curious to see it. One night, it was about time to head back into the tree where all the bats stayed and slept durring the night, Shade stayed to see the sun, and had convinced Chinook, one of the most promising new borns to stay up with him. Before the sun actually came up, Chinook became very eerie and took off back to the tree, leaving Shade alone. The owls (the bats enemies/ rivals) then saw Shade and started chasing after him. Shade managed to find his colony and escape from the owls. Shade and his colony were preparing for the trip to a place called Hibernaculum, were they would meet up with the male bats, and stay for the winter and spring. Later, the owls came back for revenge, and seperated the colony with fires that burnt and destroyed most of the Tree Haven. Luckily no on was harmed in the owl attack. All of the Silverwings (Shade's colony) traveled to a place called the Echo Chamber, a cave not far from the Tree Haven, due to catastrophic damage on the tree. Once all the new borns were ready, and all the Silverwings were large enough to last the journy and through the winter, they began there journy to Hibernaculum. Before the journey, Ariel, Shade's mother, teaches Shade a