Book Review: ‘Skylark’ by Paula McLain
Skylark by Paula McLain is a sweeping, intimate novel that follows two interconnected timelines separated by roughly three hundred years, tracing how love, survival, and institutional power repeat themselves across history.
[Note: While I am reviewing this novel independently and honestly, it should be noted that it has been provided to me by Atria Books for the purpose of this review. Warning: My review of Skylark contains some spoilers!]
Skylark: A story told in two times
In the earlier narrative, set in seventeenth-century Paris, Alouette is confined to the Salpêtrière asylum at a moment when industry, medicine, and social order are tightening their grip on women’s bodies and labor. In the later timeline, unfolding in 1939 through the German occupation of Paris, psychiatrist Kristof and Alisander move through a city hollowed by fear, resistance, and hidden passageways, while the Brodsky family faces persecution that has crept into every corner of daily life. Though the characters are separated by centuries, their lives are bound by the same forces of control, fear, and courage.
McLain tells this story with prose that is restrained, luminous, and deeply humane. Her sentences feel deliberate and grounded, allowing atmosphere and emotion to accumulate slowly, which some readers may find takes time to connect with. There is a steadiness to her prose that mirrors the endurance of her characters. Pain is never sensationalized. Love is never overstated. Instead, meaning emerges through careful observation and repetition, reinforcing the novel’s central idea that history imprints itself through systems as much as through memory.
The dual timeline is not simply a narrative device, but a structural argument. The novel insists that what is built in one era often becomes the foundation, literal and figurative, for the next. This is made strikingly clear through McLain’s attention to place. In 1664, the Gobelins Manufactory dyeing works along the Bievre River represent both innovation and exploitation. The dyes that bring color and wealth to Paris poison the river and the bodies of those who labor beside it. Alouette’s world is shaped by this imbalance, where industry and authorities work together to define whose suffering is acceptable.
At the same time, quarrymen beneath Paris are carving limestone from the earth, creating an underground lattice meant to support the city above. These quarries, born from extraction and labor, will later become the catacombs. Paula McLain draws a subtle but powerful throughline here. What is taken from the ground to build monuments above eventually becomes a hidden refuge below. The physical hollowing of the city mirrors the moral hollowing of its institutions.
This history comes into sharp focus in the 1940 timeline, when Alisander and Kristof move through the catacombs to evade danger and carry out acts of resistance. The same tunnels born of seventeenth-century labor and exploitation now offer concealment, survival, and movement beyond the reach of occupying forces. The quarrymen of Alouette’s era unknowingly created the pathways that later generations would depend on. McLain’s handling of this connection is elegant and unforced. The city remembers, even when its people are forced to forget.
Paula McLain’s intense focus on detail brings this Atria novel alive
Alouette’s experience at Salpêtrière remains one of the novel’s most harrowing elements. The asylum is portrayed not as a tragic aberration, but as an extension of the same logic that governs the dye works and the quarries. Productivity and order are valued above humanity. Women who do not conform are labeled unstable and removed from view. McLain writes these scenes with chilling restraint, showing how easily care becomes punishment when authority goes unchecked. Alouette survives through persistence and inner clarity, holding onto memory and love as acts of quiet resistance.
In the later timeline, Kristof’s work as a psychiatrist under German occupation reveals how those same institutional impulses evolve rather than disappear. Psychiatry, like dyeing and quarrying before it, becomes a tool that can either serve people or erase them. Kristof’s internal conflict exposes the danger of believing that one can remain neutral inside a corrupt system. His fear and moral hesitation feel painfully contemporary, as does his gradual recognition of complicity.
The Brodsky family anchors this era emotionally, grounding the novel’s historical forces in intimate loss and fierce devotion. Through them, McLain shows how ideology seeps into homes, relationships, and moments of love. Their story underscores the human cost of systems built on exclusion and hatred, making clear that persecution is never abstract.
What unites these timelines is McLain’s insistence that survival is active. The Bievre River, the quarries, the catacombs, and the asylum all become witnesses to repetition. Power exploits, labels, confines. And still, people endure. Love persists. Courage finds unexpected routes, sometimes underground.
Although Skylark is firmly rooted in historical detail, it feels urgently contemporary. The misuse of institutions, the erosion of rights under the guise of order, and the quiet normalization of harm resonate strongly with the present moment. McLain does not moralize. She shows. And in doing so, she reminds us that progress is fragile, memory is essential, and resistance often begins in the margins.
Ultimately, Skylark is a testament to survival, love, and moral courage. It reminds us that the structures built by exploitation can be reclaimed for resistance, and that even in the darkest passages, hate does not have the final word.
Rating: 9/10
Skylark by Paula McLain is available now for purchase! Have you read this novel yet? What did you think of McLain’s work? Let us know @bsb.insider on all social media platforms!
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