Old Favourites #1

This is not exactly a meme I am starting, since I will not be posting these very often, but if you would all like to join in, feel free :) Just leave a comment below if you're interested and perhaps I'll make it a for sure thing :) (And if someone is already doing this, google failed me, because I tried finding one. Oops)

What is Old Favourites? Reviews on new and semi-new books are great. We get to discover books soon to come out because of arc reviews, and we get to see what others think about new releases and if they're going to worth a read. But what about older books? Ones that were published years ago that we enjoyed as kids, or as young adults, and re-discovered recently. That is what this almost-meme is for. Old Favourites will revive these books, and possibly even introduce them to those who never heard of them, or were too young to read them and just getting into books now. Books are timeless.

So for my very first Old Favourites post, I want to bring to light a book series I read in the seventh third/fourth grade that I enjoyed immensely:

Title/Series: Silverwing
Author: Kenneth Oppel
First Publication Date: October, 1997

Silvering was written by bestselling Canadian author Kenneth Oppel when he was thirty years old. It was first introduced to me through a reading program called Silver Birch. From what I remember, we had the option to read from a selection of books, and then vote on our favourites. Silverwing won in 1998. Hang on, that doesn't make any sense. I was eight years old, then. Meaning I was in grade three? Four? Wow, okay. I was younger than I thought I was, folks! Moving on...
Silverwing has won a few other awards, of course. I am mentioning the Silver Birch one because it is more personal to me.

Even though this book is a middle grade, I believe it to be enjoyable at any age. I keep seeing it in the book store and wanting to pick it up along with the series, but the covers never match, and I feel very attached to the covers these books bore when I was reading them (the one above being the cover it had when I read Silverwing).

The goodreads blurb includes nothing about the actual synopsis, so I'll pull up one from elsewhere.

Amazon Blurb: 
Shade is a young silverwing bat, the runt of his colony. But he's determined to prove himself on the long, dangerous winter migration to Hibernaculum, millions of wingbeats to the south. During a fierce storm, he loses the others and soon faces the most incredible journey of his young life. Desperately searching for a way to rejoin his flock, Shade meets a remarkable cast of characters: Marina, a Brightwing bat with a strange metal band on her leg; Zephyr, a mystical albino bat with an unusual gift; and Goth, a gigantic carnivorous vampire bat. But which ones are friends and which ones are enemies? In this epic story of adventure and suspense, Shade is going to need all the help he can find -- if he hopes to ever see his family again.

Other books in the series: Sunwing, Firewing, Darkwing

My personal thoughts on the series:
I read this series years ago, and am looking forward to picking it up again. My feelings while reading this book are still with me. I remember how great the writing was (even though I was eight years old, holy cow), how Kenneth Oppel brought these fictional bats to life. Middle grade book or not, it was amazing. The adventures Shade went on in this book and the rest were incredibly captivating. I will probably do a real review later on after I read this series again. I just have no idea when that will be, since I don't currently own the books (what was I thinking by not buying them when I was younger? Probably that I had no money to do so, since I was just a kid... Haha).

To see more on the Silver Birch awards and other awards by the Forest of Reading by the Ontario Library Association in Canada, click here.


Discuss: 
I'm really curious, guys. Who else has read this series? This series was a large part of my childhood before Harry Potter came along (in the same year as Silverwing, but HP did not get introduced to me until Prisoner of Azkaban was out). So who else read these books, and what did you think? And if you didn't, you should really check them out. Your library should have them. They're amazing.