Dear Mr. Silverwing...

Dear Oppel,

I have read many of your books, but most recently I read the book “Half Brother”. I admire this book not only because of my love of chimps, but that it shows the relationship that humans can share with animals. Your book takes the relationship a step further and adds communication to it. I enjoyed how you paralleled between Ben’s adolescent growth of character and maturity and Zan’s mental and physical growth. This mutual struggle to grow as an individual is part of what I think helped Zan and Ben become brothers who love each other. You did a great job showing that. Also you evaluate the average adolescent boy’s mind. I love how you make Ben’s quest to obtain the return of affection from Jennifer just another scientific project. You show how strangely he encounters his first crush, by keeping a log book. I also think his thoughts about her are hilarious. When the thought, “I had Jennifer in front of me, so close I could see the little mole under her left ear. I wanted to taste it,” I literally laughed out loud. I don’t know if you intended all of these weird thoughts coming from Ben to be comical, but they definitely made the novel more enjoyable for me. Ben’s struggle to live up to his father’s expectations was interesting as well. He never was quite sure about what to think of his dad, and they never were really on the same page. Your examination of human and animal relationship continues to impress me.

I am very impressed by your skills as an author. I have also read your “Silverwing” series and I am impressed that you can write amazing novels from such different perspectives. In “Silverwing” and the rest of the series, you took the role of Shade, the adolescent bat, took his character, and made his personality and character grow throughout the series. This made me think of you as a writer who strictly wrote from an animal’s point of view. Before reading Half Brother, I expected it to be another book from the animal’s perspective, but you surprised me and took it from the teenage boy’s point of view.  Your vast amount of imagination is incomprehensible to me in how you can come up with all of these stories, and still manage to show the connection of humans to animals. Your writing has made me think time and time again, “Do animals really feel this way?” As a result of this, I am kinder to all sorts of animals. When I found an opossum in my garage instead if thinking, “I’m going to kill this damn thing,” I thought, “He must be really cold out there.” Your examination of animal’s minds, making them more human, has led me to think entirely differently about anything that breathes. Never again will I look at an animal and think of it as just something, I’ll think of it more as one of us. Thank you for the insight.

Sincerely,

            Dylan Bird