Lark

April 18, 2011
Neither character-driven nor plot-driven, middle-grade author Porter's first YA novel is a message-driven story about three teenage girls who have suffered at the hands of men. The 16-year-old title character has been stabbed, raped, and left to die of hypothermia in the woods near her home. Her voice alternates with those of two friends, Nyetta and Eve, who are coping with their own betrayals by men in their lives (Nyetta's father abandoned her family; Eve was molested by a coach). Lark, meanwhile, faces further victimization after her deathâshe will, like other murdered girls, be imprisoned forever in a tree if no one truly acknowledges what happened to her. It's neither clear what supernatural agency would inflict such a fate nor why the acknowledgement of law enforcement is insufficient, but Eve and Nyetta must come to terms with their own lives, and with Lark's death, for all three to move on. Porter (Billy Creekmore) develops strong, distinct voices for each girl, but they are the flat characters of a parable. Ages 12âup.

April 15, 2011

After the rape and murder of a suburban 16-year-old, two girls learn to cope in a world that stubbornly insists on continuing without her. 

Lark is a gymnast, diver and stellar student, until one January day she's kidnapped from her Arlington, Va., school. Her body is found naked, beaten and stabbed in the snowy woods. Over the next few months, the children and adults of Arlington recover—or fail to recover—from Lark's death. Interleaved chapters provide three points of view: Eve, who was Lark's childhood friend until a devastating experience of her own led to Eve's personality shift in middle school; Nyetta, whose parents are going through a messy divorce and who thought Lark was the best babysitter ever; and Lark herself, who recaps the rape and murder in gutwrenching ghostly interludes. Lark's ghost is haunting Nyetta in an attempt to get someone, anyone, to look directly at the damage done by the murderer. It's no easy task: This is a town where grief counselors teach girls that avoiding assault is a matter of how they dress, move and walk. It's a town where a mother doesn't take her daughter's assault seriously because there hasn't been penetrative sex. Nyetta and Eve will only be able to move past Lark's death if they face its most devastating truths.

Harrowing. (Fiction. 13 & up)

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

August 1, 2011

Gr 8 Up-Lark Austin is only 16 when she is kidnapped, raped, and murdered. Her former best friend, Eve; her former babysitting charge, Nyetta; and Lark herself take turns telling this poignant story. Lark gets trapped in limbo, becoming a part of the tree where, her arms tied behind her, she was left to die. She begins to communicate with Nyetta, begging for her help in order to be set free. Eve is still recovering from being molested by her swim coach, which has caused her to withdraw from everyone around her. Nyetta is homeschooled, living primarily with her unemotional mother, and has no one with whom to really connect. The girls are all looking for someone to hear them. Readers may initially be reminded of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones (Little, Brown, 2002), but the story takes its own path at once. The concise narrative holds deep and honest emotions as the characters go through the stages of dealing with Lark's untimely and gruesome death. An excellent addition to YA collections.-Emily Chornomaz, Camden County Library System, Camden, NJ

Copyright 2011 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2011
Grades 8-11 After a kidnapping, brutal assault, and rape, 16-year-old Lark is left bound to a tree and dies of exposure in a snowstorm. Eve, once Lark's best friend, was the last person to see her alive and struggles to find the right way to react. Nyetta, a younger girl Lark once babysat, is visited by Lark's plaintive ghost. If Lark can't convince someone to look at her and bear witness to her wounds, she will be trapped in the tree, unable to move on into the afterlife. Nyetta is troubled by Lark's demands and forms an unlikely friendship with Eve and Eve's boyfriend, Ian, to find a way to help Lark go. In this sparse and poetic novel, Lark's ordeal is depicted briefly but with enough detail that it may be difficult for sensitive readers. Ultimately, though, this is a haunting addition to the dead girl genre that treats the survivors' emotions, guilt, and pain gently and with a great deal of understanding.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)

Starred review from May 1, 2011
In the tradition of The Lovely Bones, portions of this riveting novel are narrated by a murdered girl; but it is the mythological quality of her afterlife that gives the story its unique resonance. Sixteen-year-old Lark was abducted after gymnastics practice, raped in a wooded section of Washington, D.C., tied to a tree, and left to die. Porter's spare, luminous prose doesn't flinch from the tragedy, but it doesn't dwell gratuitously on it either. As Lark is dying -- an unforgettable scene -- voices of other murdered girls speak to her from inside the surrounding trees. "'It's almost over'...said the one keeping watch. 'Now.' She closed her eyes and began to cry. Snow turned to sleet and covered the branches in ice." Additional chapters are voiced by Eve, a former friend of Lark's grappling with her own past experience of sexual molestation, and Nyetta, a twelve-year-old neighbor whom Lark's ghost visits. "Lark wants me to see her. She needs me to see where the knife went in, because if no one knows what it was like for her, then her spirit will be trapped in that tree." Haunting natural imagery depicting Lark's gradual transformation interweaves beautifully with Porter's nuanced portrayal of what it's like to be a girl navigating an often confusing, sometimes dangerous world. christine m. heppermann

(Copyright 2011 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)

April 15, 2011

After the rape and murder of a suburban 16-year-old, two girls learn to cope in a world that stubbornly insists on continuing without her.

Lark is a gymnast, diver and stellar student, until one January day she's kidnapped from her Arlington, Va., school. Her body is found naked, beaten and stabbed in the snowy woods. Over the next few months, the children and adults of Arlington recover--or fail to recover--from Lark's death. Interleaved chapters provide three points of view: Eve, who was Lark's childhood friend until a devastating experience of her own led to Eve's personality shift in middle school; Nyetta, whose parents are going through a messy divorce and who thought Lark was the best babysitter ever; and Lark herself, who recaps the rape and murder in gutwrenching ghostly interludes. Lark's ghost is haunting Nyetta in an attempt to get someone, anyone, to look directly at the damage done by the murderer. It's no easy task: This is a town where grief counselors teach girls that avoiding assault is a matter of how they dress, move and walk. It's a town where a mother doesn't take her daughter's assault seriously because there hasn't been penetrative sex. Nyetta and Eve will only be able to move past Lark's death if they face its most devastating truths.

Harrowing. (Fiction. 13 & up)

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)