Blog Tour: Author Bites - Meagan Spooner Waxes on SKYLARK + Giveaway!

I don't actually interview authors often but every once in a while they'll want to deviate from my standard blog posts and will have me wing some questions at them.  Wing I did.  Hopefully this'll give you all more insight into SKYLARK and if you haven't read it yet this should light a hotter fire under your ass.  Thanks for stopping by, Meagan!

You did a good job of portraying the disparity of the city in a multitude of ways, and not glossing over any of it. Is this only the beginning of the lengths they'll go to in order to preserve themselves?

One of the things that's constant throughout all three books is the struggle between what is right and what is best. I love moral grey areas--I love exploring territory where it's not clear what's right and wrong. We all grow up thinking in terms of black and white, and I think one of the hallmarks of becoming a teenager, of becoming an adult, is that you start to realize that it's not always that simple. In fact, it rarely is. While I can't quite go into deep specifics about books two and three, I will say that SKYLARK is the most black and white of all three, in terms of "good guys" and "bad guys." Lark's home city is a part of that, and in book two, she ends up in another city just as morally troubled as the first, but in different ways. And we haven't seen the last of the Institute.

Lark can see past people's rougher exteriors to something that others might not realize is even there, even considering her upbringing (Oren being more than a feral boy following her, the woman and child in the magic bubble, etc.) and experiences. At times it seems to almost be a fault. Is this something we're going to see her grow beyond or has her time in the wild reshaped her thinking of people in general?

Having lived most of her life in an utterly sheltered environment, Lark has not had many experiences with people beyond the ones she grew up with. One of the things I've enjoyed most about working on book two (which I finished a couple months ago, and am now revising) is exposing her to forms of civilization entirely different from what she's encountered before. I think with each broadening of her world, Lark's view of the people around her expands as well. And while I can't go into it without spoiling the end of SKYLARK, I can say that by the final pages Lark transcends the definitions of what she thought she was... book two is all about her struggle to understand herself, and what she's become. Power isn't always a gift, after all. The demons Lark faces in book two don't all wear fangs and claws.

Is your world supposed to be our earth? Are we going to see more of this war that completely destroyed the world?

Originally, it was our earth. The basic idea was that people discover "magic" in the near future, and society exploits it as a resource the way we've exploited our existing resources. Leads to a cataclysm, and then voila, post-apocalyptic magic world. In revision, though, I decided to take it another direction and create a world separate, but similar. An alternate universe, of sorts--one where magic was always the dominant power behind technology. But human nature in this world is the same as human nature in ours, and the exploitation of that resource was always inevitable.

We are going to see more of the war! We learn a bit more about it in book two--how the Renewables were involved, what they did that was so terrible, how they could have destroyed the world in their quest for power. And in book three... well, that would be telling. But I'll just say that instead of just learning about it, we get to see it.

Your world is a combination of fey and steampunk. What made you decide to go this split route? Could one pure side or another have worked in the world you created?

I think that I probably could have told a lot of the same surface story by choosing either steampunk or magic. But at the risk of sounding utterly pretentious, I think the themes would have changed. Lark is caught between two worlds--the rigid, orderly, measured, safe world of machines and technology (the steampunk aspect) and then the wild, ruthless, dangerous, beautiful world of magic. Magic is wild and untamed, machines are by their very natures controlled, doing what they were designed to do and no more. The juxtaposition of these two elements is so much fun to play with. If I'd chosen one kind of world or the other, I wouldn't have the same external factors on Lark as she's having these internal struggles. Her world really is a reflection of herself.

Can we expect more unabashed monstrosities in the next book a la chick hooked to tubes and siphoned for power? I found that particular aspect of your story to be especially grounding, that you aren't afraid to go where it needs to go.

The last thing you need to worry about with my books is a lack of monstrosities in them. One of the things I love most about working with my editor at Carolrhoda Lab, Andrew Karre, is that he not only lets me go to dark places and explore them--he encourages me, when so many YA authors and books are shying away from the dark. So much of human nature is below the surface... scuttling away in the dark, hidden and not talked about. I like to find those creepy-crawlies and drag them out so people can see. I think what makes it so horrifying is that we can see ourselves in these shadows. I don't like villains who are just evil, you know? I like people who do "bad" things because they don't know what else to do, because their choice was, in their eyes, the only thing they could do. Someone who we can look at and say, "I'm not sure I would've done differently in his place." There's always a reason behind every terrible act my characters commit. And sometimes it's a really good reason.

But they're still going to do plenty of terrible things.

Find Meagan across the web -

Website: http://www.meaganspooner.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/MeaganSpooner
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/SkylarkTrilogy
 Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10352973-skylark

Giveaway time!

Meagan has generously offered up a bunch of SKYLARK swag!  Just fill out the form below for your chance to win!

• Open to US and Canadian residents 13 years of age and only only.
• One entry per person per email address.
• Duplicate entries will be deleted.
• Entrants must be a follower of Bites via one of the following mediums: GFC, RSS, Goodreads, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.
• Giveaway ends July 30th at midnight, EST.

Blog Tour: Skylark by Meagan Spooner

Pub date: August 1, 2012.

Author website.

Vis in magia, in vita vi. In magic there is power, and in power, life.

For fifteen years, Lark Ainsley waited for the day when her Resource would be harvested and she would finally be an adult. After the harvest she expected a small role in the regular, orderly operation of the City within the Wall. She expected to do her part to maintain the refuge for the last survivors of the Wars. She expected to be a tiny cog in the larger clockwork of the city.


Lark did not expect to become the City's power supply.


For fifteen years, Lark Ainsley believed in a lie. Now she must escape the only world she's ever known...or face a fate more unimaginable than death.  (Meagan Spooner)

SKYLARK is a bumrush of intensity from the very beginning, throwing Lark Ainsley into the middle of what is rightly a conspiracy theory that few, if any, deign to think about.  Carolrhoda Lab comes through for me again, delivering a story that doesn't let its protagonist get away with a damn thing and makes sure she suffers from beginning to end, forcing her to earn every right she obtains for herself.

The world itself is vaguely familiar, giving hints that it could be our Earth but it might not be, cloaked over with fizzling bubbles of magic that keep people human.  Lark lives in one such bubble artificially generated by what she thought was harvested magic from children but what it turns out to be is a person, or people if the government is lucky enough, thought extinct, regenerating their energy and having it constantly siphoned off of them for the purpose of fueling the city.  And Spooner isn't shy about giving you details so if your stomach lies a little on the weaker side you might want to skim through some of the passages detailing what Lark sees, and what ultimately happens to her.

What I especially loved about SKYLARK was that every time I wanted to slap Lark for being dumb someone else was there to do it for me in the story.  One of my favorite quotes?

"You can't come crashing into the wilderness, half-starved and wholly incompetent, and imply I'm some kind of monster for keeping your skin intact."

 This is Oren and he had me going YES!  Logic makes my brain waves happy.  And when Lark first tumbles out of the city, out from under an artificial sky and under the real one, the depth of her discomfort is so excellently portrayed that I couldn't help feeling her fear of the sky on Lark's part.  There's something to be said for something so simple being so brilliantly portrayed.  It's the sky.  It's something so totally natural but Spooner tapped into aspects of Lark that are otherwise difficult for authors to access.  I believed every second of Lark's fear for the sky as if I were living it myself.  If that's not good writing I don't know what is.

The greater story arc, the one about the city parasiting power where they can, spurning some giant conspiracy theory, isn't a wholly original one and I definitely had moments of comparing it to AVATAR (the blue people movie, not the airbender movie), where a seemingly primitive people are harvested for what they can provide to the more "advanced" people, read: seemingly stronger.  But it's the way it was written that kept me hooked.  The world is an amalgam of steampunk and fairy, melding the two together in this clinking hybrid that was both organized and chaotic, with machines making nature frightening and the absence of magic dementing a person beyond human recognition.  And where the story ends is just the beginning for Lark as she desperately comes to terms with herself before she loses herself entirely.

The steampunk is exceptionally light but I do think steampunk fans would be won over by its use and the same goes for the fairy/magic aspect.  But combine the two and they're a thundering driving force throughout the story, neither existing without the other in some fashion.  Lark is a strong yet at times nonsensical heroine that's trying to get by on her own strength but recognizes her weaknesses.  She admits to her faults, begrudgingly, and at times lets her heart lead instead of her brain.  If you start reading SKYLARK for any kind of romance stop now.  You won't really find it here and what is there shatters to infinite pieces the definition of romance.  Really if you're looking for something inherently familiar and grounded in a reality that's both within reach and fantastical with a character made strong by her situation and forced to stand on her own (most of the time) then you'll find it in SKYLARK.  Let me tell you how refreshing it is not to have a YA novel of some kind of fantastical type NOT focused on romance.  Like being able to breath after being bound in a corset, let me tell you.

Ban Factor: High - Magic in a maybe-not-earth with no hint of a religion other than the magic that is the source of a city's power?  Ha!  Banned!

Meagan Spooner grew up reading and writing every spare moment of the day, while dreaming about life as an archaeologist, a marine biologist, an astronaut. She graduated from Hamilton College in New York with a degree in playwriting, and has spent several years since then living in Australia. She's traveled with her family all over the world to places like Egypt, South Africa, the Arctic, Greece, Antarctica, and the Galapagos, and there's a bit of every trip in every story she writes. She currently lives and writes in Northern Virginia, but the siren call of travel is hard to resist, and there's no telling how long she'll stay there. In her spare time she plays guitar, plays video games, plays with her cat, and reads. She is the author of SKYLARK, coming out August 1 from Carolrhoda Lab/Lerner Books. She is also the co-author of THESE BROKEN STARS, forthcoming from Disney-Hyperion in Fall 2013. (author blurb)

Stay tuned for an interview with Meagan herself and a nifty swag giveaway coming up later today!