Watership Down science fiction writer and conservative social commentator writing in the "National Review", declared that the novel was "pleasant enough, but it has about the same intellectual firepower as Dumbo." He pilloried it further: ""Watership Down" is an adventure story, no more than that: rather a swashbuckling crude one to boot. There are virtuous rabbits and bad rabbits: if that’s allegory, "Bonanza" is an allegory." John Rowe Townsend notes that the book quickly achieved such a high popularity despite the fact that it "came out at a high price and in an unattractive jacket from a publisher who had hardly been
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