Skylark by Meagan Spooner - ADVISABLE

 

Spooner, Meagan Skylark, 333 pgs.  Carolrhoda Lab, 2012.  $17.95  Content: Language: PG-13 (8 swears); Mature Content: PG-13; Violence: PG-13. 

Lark is a fifteen year old girl who lives in an enclosed city that is run by bits of magic.  The government gets the magic by harvesting teenagers and drawing out their magic.  Once the magic has been taken out of the teens they are considered adults.  Lark keeps waiting for her turn to be harvested, but when it finally arrives she finds that the government has a lot of secrets about how they obtain the magic through the pain of others.  When Lark fears that she might become the next victim, a boy from the government helps her to escape outside the city wall.  However, what Lark finds outside the city wall is just a different kind of life threatening than inside the city.  Lark begins a journey across a desolate land to get to another civilization where people with magic are accepted and in the process she questions everything she has ever known. 

I’m torn about how to rate this book.  The first 120 pages is optional and then the last 200 pages are essential.  In the beginning I felt like I was wading through a new world and trying to figure out how it worked and I didn’t feel connected to the main character.  For fifty pages she wanders in the desolate world outside the wall by herself, so it’s just a bunch of description.  However, when she finds another person and they team up, their combined story is impossible to put down.  There are twists and turns throughout the rest of the book and I actually found myself crying at one climatic point in the book.  I will definitely read the next book in the series and I loved the ending so much I’m putting it at advisable. 

MS, HS-ADVSIABLE.  Reviewer, C. Peterson.