Firewing

Firewing by Kenneth Oppel is a dark animal fantasy for 9 year olds about a young bat who is frightened of everything, and then falls into the place where the dead live.

What happens

Griffin is a Silverwing newborn and a champion worrier. He eats caterpillars because somebody has to stop them stripping the forest bare. He won't drink from the creek in case a fish leaps out and drags him under. He is fairly sure the owl on the branch opposite is working out which of them to swallow.

His friends think this is hilarious. They ask him what the worst thing that could happen is, mostly because his answers are so detailed.

He isn't much of a flier either. His wings are too long and his fur is wrong, banded bright where everyone else's is black and silver, because his mother is a Brightwing and his father is not.

The father is really the point. Shade is a hero in this colony. There are stories about him, and Griffin is quietly certain he is not the son those stories deserve.

Then one night the newborns smell smoke and go to look, because Luna wants to and Griffin cannot face saying no twice in one evening. Humans, a fire, and a forest that is about to tear itself open.

This comes after the earlier books about Shade, and it reads better if your child has met him already. It stands alone well enough, but most of the weight in it is Shade's past arriving on his son's head, and you feel that far more if you know what the past was.

The underworld chapters are where the book earns its reputation. The dead are down there. So is the rule that a living creature who wanders in has very little time before it stops being a visitor.

Which means a caution. There is real death in this book and a lot of fear about it. A young bat is lost underground, his parents believe they may not reach him in time, and the thing hunting him knows exactly what it wants. Bats are killed. For a 9 year old who is currently anxious about dying, this is not the one to hand over.

For a reader who wants animal fantasy with genuine stakes, and who does not want the danger tidied away at the end of the chapter, it is exactly right.

What to read next

If Shade is new to them, the first Silverwing book starts with Shade as the runt of the colony, blown off course on his first migration south.