Watership Down French word for rabbit. "Watership Down" has been described as an allegory, with the labours of Hazel, Fiver, Bigwig, and Silver "mirror[ing] the timeless struggles between tyranny and freedom, reason and blind emotion, and the individual and the corporate state." Adams draws on classical heroic and quest themes from Homer and Virgil, creating a story with epic motifs. The book explores the themes of exile, survival, heroism, leadership, political responsibility, and the "making of a hero and a community". Joan Bridgman's analysis of Adams's works in "The Contemporary Review" identifies the community and hero motifs: "[T]he hero's journey into a
Silverwing (novel) Silverwing (novel) Silverwing is a best-selling children's novel, written by Kenneth Oppel, first published in 1997 by HarperCollins. It tells the story of a colony of silverwing bats. The tone and artistic ambition of this series of bestsellers has been compared to the classic animal novel "Watership Down". "Silverwing" is the first installment of the Silverwing series, though it is chronologically the second novel in the sequence after "Darkwing". Shade is a young Silverwing bat whose father disappeared before he was born. He lives with his mother Ariel and is bullied by other newborns, especially Chinook and his friends, for