“I don’t want to be kept, not by anyone.”

Lark Ainsley is a sixteen year old girl living in a city enclosed entirely by a dome made of energy. The dome is all that protects the city from the monsters living outside in the wilderness. In order to sustain the dome, however, the city needs to harvest magical energy from its children. When it is Lark’s turn to be harvested, it is discovered that she is a Renewable and is able to regenerate her energy each time it is harvested. When she realizes that the Architects of the city intend to keep putting her through the painful harvesting process indefinitely in order to constantly use her energy, she decides to escape the only home she has ever known. She escapes into the wilderness alone in search of the Iron Wood where she hopes to find others like her.

This book had such incredible world building! I loved reading about the post-apocalyptic world that Lark traveled through to find the Iron Wood. The ways that magical energy created domes was really interesting–some domes froze the entire area under it in a specific time and others preserved an entire forest inside.

I really liked Lark; she is brave and while she does have trust issues after finding out what the Architects wanted to do to her, she learns to trust again by the end of the book. She both literally and figuratively makes a long journey from start to finish. She meets a wild boy named Oren who helps her survive even though they are both reluctant to trust each other. He is terrified of the Iron Wood and tries to convince her not to go there but Lark is set on finding others like her. Their relationship really grew throughout the book and there was a serious twist near the end that I never saw coming!

Overall, Skylark was an exciting book full of incredible world building and so many unexpected twists! I am definitely excited for the sequel, and I hope to find out more about what happened to make the world of Skylark the way it is.

Skylark was released August 1, 2012 and is the first of a series. The sequel, Shadowlark, is due to be released in 2013.