Firewing
Goth, the monstrous cannibal bat who plotted to kill the sun, may have been blown to bits at the end of Kenneth Oppel's Sunwing. But this doesn't stop Oppel from including his arch-villain in yet another electrifying sequel to the bat saga he began in 1997 with Silverwing. The most fantastical by far of the three books, Firewingtakes its readers on a breathtaking journey into a bat underworld ruled by Cama Zotz and his dreaded Vampyrum Spectrum. While cosmology has always hung in the background of Oppel's bat novels, in Firewingthe struggle between the sun god Nocturna and her dark twin Zotz finally comes to the fore. Oppel also introduces a new hero in Griffin, the "newborn" of Shade Silverwing and his mate, Marina.As this visually thrilling tour-de-force opens, Griffin has been sucked down into the underworld through a suspicious fissure in the earth's crust. Pursued by his father, Shade, but also by the dead Goth who wants to steal his life force, Griffin makes his way over a bizarre landscape to a fiery tree planted by Nocturna. Naturally, he meets a host of memorable characters on his journey, including a giant bat with the face of a fox and Luna, a newly dead silverwing from his own colony, who ends up playing Marina to Griffin's Shade. Oppel's underworld is a smoke-and-mirrors purgatory where dead bats are tricked into believing they are still alive and where the enlightened "Pilgrims," who seek passage to Nocturna's better afterlife, are despised as radicals. Drawing on ideas from Christianity, Buddhism, and other religions, Oppel constructs an intellectually stimulating fantasy world that will captivate readers as young as eight. --Lisa Alward