Skylark by Meagan Spooner
Random House, 2012. ISBN: 9780552565561.
Recommended for older readers, aged 15 and over. The teen fantasy
novel Skylark, written by Meagan Spooner, starts in the
deceptively well-ordered and apparently peaceful post-apocalyptic
world of the only remaining city on earth, a city surrounded by the
legendary Wall, the protective barrier created to stop the reputedly
dangerous horrors of the world beyond. Life for 16 year old Lark
Ainsley is far from ordinary, however; while most children dutifully
attend school and learn their lessons, awaiting their selection for
assignment to a particular occupation on Harvest Day, usually before
their twelfth birthdays, Lark is sneaking into the school through
the sewers to look at the Harvest Day names' list and wondering why
she hasn't been harvested yet. As she has been taught, like all the
other children, to fear the magical power of the Resource, she must
elude the copper mechanical pixies which can sense any use of the
Resource and capture those individuals guilty for Adjustment. But it
is on the day when she knows for sure that her name is not the
Harvest Day list, that her brother Caesar, a Regulator, arrives at
their parents' flat to announce that she has been selected for
harvesting on this Harvest Day list after all.
So begins Lark's journey into the Institute of Magic and Philosophy,
and her discovery that the reason why no-one ever explains exactly
what happens during a harvesting, except for the delectable,
enormous feast which follows it, is because their memories have been
altered by the Institute in their quest for continued power: an
unbelievably terrible truth about what harvesting really means. It
is what Lark learns in the Institute which shows her that her only
possible escape is through the Wall into the world beyond.
For experienced readers familiar with the dystopian fiction of some
of the great writers in English literature - H.G. Wells' The
Time Machine, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and
George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four or fans of The
Matrix film series - Spooner's new novel resonates with all
the distrust of any society, institution or organisation of people
which hides the true nature of their actions beneath a heavy cloak
of secrecy and polite social veneer. However, within the darkness of
a society which does not protect its children, but deliberately and
calculatingly steers them toward a hidden torture and a life of
unthinking compliance with what actually constitutes evil, the
character of Lark is a bright light, shining with the determination
that can only be born of great endurance through a terrible ordeal.
Although her escape is forced upon her under otherwise unthinkable
circumstances, her journey through the Wall takes her into a world
that is peopled with individuals who are far more human than the
monsters in her home-city: the very individuals who will help her in
her fight against the Institute and all it stands for.
Kate Hall
