Skylark Review

344 pages
Release date: October 1st, 2012

Sixteen year-old Lark Ainsley has never seen the sky. Her world ends at the edge of the vast domed barrier of energy enclosing all that’s left of humanity. For two hundred years the city has sustained this barrier by harvesting its children's innate magical energy when they reach adolescence. When it’s Lark’s turn to be harvested, she finds herself trapped in a nightmarish web of experiments and learns she is something out of legend itself: a Renewable, able to regenerate her own power after it’s been stripped. Forced to flee the only home she knows to avoid life as a human battery, Lark must fight her way through the terrible wilderness beyond the edge of the world. With the city’s clockwork creations close on her heels and a strange wild boy stalking her in the countryside, she must move quickly if she is to have any hope of survival. She’s heard the stories that somewhere to the west are others like her, hidden in secret – but can she stay alive long enough to find them?

Review (ARC):
This is one of those books that you just can't put down. The world building is amazing and different from most dystopian novels. The mesh between magic and a dystopian world is exceptional to the point where it doesn't make this novel too much like a typical fantasy novel. Lark is the main character and I have to admit she was a bit hard to take at times with her whole no violence and no meat thing going on. However, I loved the fact that Lark wasn't originally what you thought she was and that she grows a bit more by the end of the book. Lark has to go through a lot when its discovered that she is a Renewable and this leads her on an adventure beyond her imagining. As Lark journeys she meets other people who also have more to them than meets the eye and that will either turn out to be a good thing or a bad thing. There was a lot about the world that made it both beautiful and terrifying at the same time, but this all just made for a good read. I definitely recommend this to those who are fans of dystopian and magic based novels alike.