Sunwing by Kenneth Oppel Date of Publication: 1999 ISBN: 000648171X Number of Pages: 300

REQUIRED READING ABILITY: Average
GENRES: Adventure, Fantasy
THEMES: Good versus Evil, Coming of Age, Family, Life versus Death, Sacrifice and Redemption, Survival

SUMMARY:
Shade and Marina are back and on another incredible adventure, but this time they end up in Goth and Throbb's world, the home of the Vampyrum Spectrum.

Shade has never given up the hope that his father, missing a year earlier, might still be alive. With this in mind, he and Marina set out to track him on the basis of information Shade has heard. They find a strange human building that attracts many thousands of bats, and although it hints at paradise, these two young bats aren't so sure. Still, Shade is determined to explore every lead, and so he ends up captive in a human plot for destruction. This takes him to a far southern jungle (South America), the homeland of his previous enemy Goth and Goth’s followers, other cannibal bats with three-foot wingspans. The war between the bats and owls has been intensifying, but Shade finds friends and allies in a young owl prince and an army of rats whom he meets on his journey. Goth has apparently survived his previous encounter with Shade, now holds Shade’s father hostage, and intends to be the new king of the underworld. As Shade and his little band of rebels battle Goth in a ruined Aztec pyramid, Shade’s quest to save his father becomes even larger…but can the little Silverwing bat save his entire world from eternal night?

WHO WOULD LOVE THIS BOOK? A kid who...

• enjoys fantasy
• loved Silverwing
• likes adventure, suspense and danger in a tale
• enjoys stories about unlikely heroes and underdogs
• enjoys stories about anthropomorphic characters and worlds
• is against animal testing
• likes bats
• enjoys a classic battle between the forces of good and evil, with archetypal heroes and villains

WHAT ELSE?
This book has won numerous awards, including Mr Christie's Book Award, the Canadian Library Association’s Book of the Year for Children, the Ruth Schwartz Award for Excellence in Children’s Literature, and five others. It is a fabulously exciting and engaging tale, popular with male and female readers equally. While it is even better than Silverwing, you will likely want to have students read them in order, though you don’t have to do so. The sequel to this book is Firewing.


RELATED LINKS:
Author’s Website
Guided Reading Webbing Unit