Silverwing

Silverwing begins with a bat catching a beetle in mid-air with his tail.

What happens

Shade is a newborn silverwing and the smallest bat in his colony, born early and so slight that his mother carried him everywhere until he learned to hold on. He sees with his ears. Oppel writes it as a net of sound thrown out into the dark, with the beetle glowing inside it like quicksilver.

What Shade cannot do is catch a tiger moth. He gets close, and then the moth scrambles his echoes into a dozen false moths, folds its wings and drops straight out of his path. He flips. Everyone watches. A large, handsome, spectacularly dim bat called Chinook snaps up the moth in front of him and calls him Runt.

That is Shade in one page. Small, quick, curious, and absolutely furious about it.

The colony leaves for the winter in three nights. The journey south is millions of wingbeats, and Shade has a private fear that he will not make it, and a second one about sleeping for four months without waking.

Then Chinook boasts that his father once killed an owl, Shade says no bat can, and the argument turns into a dare.

Bats are forbidden to look at the sun. It is the first law any newborn is taught, and the stories say it will blind you and then turn you to dust. Shade announces he is going up the hill to watch the sunrise. Chinook comes with him and loses his nerve. Shade stays.

The chase that follows is the finest writing in the opening. An owl that appears out of nowhere, wings that make no sound at all, a mother arriving in the air above him hissing at him to fly, and a plunge down through the branches with claws going past his tail.

This part is properly frightening and it is worth saying so. Shade is in real danger from something that would happily eat him. It is chase rather than gore, and it ends with him safe inside a hollow oak and his mother shaking with rage, which is exactly the right ending for it.

Underneath the adventure is something your reader will recognise straight away. Shade knows more than the popular bat does. He corrects him about what the icicles in the winter caves actually are. Nobody cares. So he does something reckless for one look of admiration, gets it, and finds it costs more than he bargained for.

What to read next

For another small and doubted animal with a very long way to travel, try Watership Down, which is in the library. Fiver is the last and smallest of his litter, he is jumpy about everything, and when he finally sees something terrible coming for his warren his brother is the only one who takes him seriously.