Books on the Boat: Skylark by Paula McLain
Color, catacombs, and the hidden chambers beneath a spring in Maine
Paula McLain’s Skylark carries readers across two Parises and the bedrock beneath them. This week’s Bountiful Path Virtual Book Circle gathered readers from Maine to Algeria, each bringing a book that mattered. The float at Madeleine Point offered its own sign of spring.
Just across the water from us on Littlejohn Island, the float at Madeleine Point on Cousins Island is in now. I noticed this while out running one day. That small sign of the season feels almost ceremonial. Our own island float still bobs in the mooring field, not yet attached to the dock.
Each day, I check on it while walking or running by.
It is the time of year when my book stack begins to shift. The light stays with us longer, and the sunsplashes appear in new places. Some days between work tasks, I pick up whatever I am reading and follow our small dogs, Shark and Newt, into the patch of sunlight where they have already settled.
Paula McLain’s Skylark came off the stack this week.
Spring comes to Paris so gradually it seems to approach on tiptoe. The war, however, remains eerily distant. Dispatches from the front read more like stories from some other time, some other world. The only real fighting is happening in Finland, where Soviet and Finnish forces wage their own private conflict, as if on the snowy face of the moon.
— Paula McLain, Skylark
McLain’s writing drew me in first. Her metaphors hold light and shadow together. I found myself lingering over sentences, then returning to them.
The colors beneath the story
The novel moves between two eras in Paris, one in the seventeenth century and one under gathering wartime pressure, with the underground city beneath them binding the stories together. In the seventeenth-century chapter, Alouette is the daughter of a master dyer at the Gobelins.
Lately, I have been reading about the history of color, so I was delighted to stumble upon this storyline in Skylark. I had previously learned about dyers’ guilds, the class distinctions woven into who could wear which shades, and how difficult color once was to make.
Dyers had to coax pigment from roots, minerals, insects, plants, and time. Color was labor. It was trade. It was secrecy. It was status.
“By law, and by birth, members of nobility alone own the right to wear such color, the clergy to sanctify it, the Gobelins to control its making.”
— Paula McLain, Skylark
That world made Alouette’s story especially vivid to me. McLain does not use color simply as decoration. She understands that color has long carried meaning far beyond beauty. Who could make it, who could afford it, who could wear it, and who had to go without. Those questions were never only aesthetic. They were social and political too.
Alouette sees color not only as craft but also as freedom.
“The river offers its secrets freely to anyone patient enough to listen. Anyone stubborn enough to resist the rules that bind women like her to numbing lives of labor and service to others.”
— Paula McLain, Skylark
What lies below
The underground in Skylark felt familiar to me for a different reason.
Having spent time in the caves of Cayman Brac, I know that being underground changes your sense of time and attention. Stone recalibrates scale. Time and attention change as you move through darkness, stone on every side. McLain captures that feeling, describing the catacombs and tunnels beneath Paris.
I also went to Paris, years ago, and found that the city carries its history in its architecture, both above and below ground. The walls, the scale, and the endurance of the place still remind us of what has happened there. I was there before 2019, before the fire that would significantly damage the Notre-Dame Cathedral. History continues to unfold even as we live it.
What Skylark understands is that the underground is never only physical. Every city has what it displays proudly and what it tries to conceal. Every profession does too.
“Below its poisoned surface lies an alchemy of minerals, the last remnants of the deep past…”
— Paula McLain, Skylark
As a woman physician, I read the Salpêtrière passages with real discomfort. McLain does not look away from the abuse that female patients endured there. Medicine has always held brilliance alongside blindness. Institutions can heal, but they can also contain, label, dismiss, and erase. A novel like Skylark reminds me how important it is to keep looking for the person beneath the diagnosis, and for the human being beneath the institution.
From this week’s Bountiful Path Virtual Book Circle
Our second Bountiful Path Virtual Book Circle brought more voices into the room this week. My co-facilitator, Karen Longfellow, and I gathered with readers from Maine, North Carolina, Arizona, and Algeria.
In our circle, there is no assigned book, no homework, and no pressure to finish anything before arriving. What emerges instead is a conversation shaped by attention, curiosity, and whatever the readers would like us to know about the books they share.
In this session, three themes naturally surfaced.
The first began with Amy McNee’s We Need Your Art. This book sparked a conversation about creativity, imposter syndrome, and the necessity of stepping into one’s identity before anyone else offers permission. One reader spoke about how self-doubt often arrives at the very moment a person is closest to meaningful work. Another reflected on how often women have had to claim authority inwardly before the world was willing to acknowledge it outwardly.
The second centered on humble leadership. Having recently featured it here on The Bountiful Path, I brought Jennifer J. Merz’s Steadfast: Frances Perkins, Champion of Workers’ Rights, a children’s book that still manages to say something profound about public life. Frances Perkins did not confuse visibility with leadership. She kept showing up, year after year, as the work itself demanded.
My mother brought The Sea Captain’s Wife by Tilar J. Mazzeo, the true story of Mary Ann Patten, a nineteen-year-old who took command of a clipper ship after her husband became gravely ill rounding Cape Horn. Those stories opened into a larger conversation about women who express their strength through steadiness, endurance, and a refusal to leave the room when things become difficult.
The third theme encompassed war, witness, and the work of closing distance. Kristin Hannah’s The Women and The Nightingale entered the conversation alongside Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway. Together, these books raised questions about whose suffering becomes visible, whose stories remain peripheral. How books can bring readers closer to lives and histories they might otherwise never fully see.
Readers also shared Marie Bostwick’s The Book Club for Troublesome Women and Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s Happy Land. It was a remarkable stack of virtual circle books. Art and courage. Friendship and feminism. Leadership without flourish. Histories buried and brought back into view.
Perhaps that is one reason Skylark felt so right for this particular week, even though it was Steadfast that I brought to the circle.
So many of the books in the room were asking some version of the same question:
What have we overlooked?
What have we hidden?
A boat book for deeper water
Skylark is not a light read. It is one to bring to a float on a quiet spring afternoon, when you are willing to give yourself fully to a story that asks for attention and gives beauty back in return.
It is one to savor in a sunspot.
Skylark offered histories of color, the enduring architecture of Paris, and that old familiar reminder that the truest things do not announce themselves from the street.
Your turn
What book are you reading right now that feels richer the deeper you go into it? Which book would you bring to a circle like this one?
Thank you for reading, and for walking this bountiful path with me. I always love hearing what is on your book pile, what you are still thinking about, and what stories have surprised you.
Lisa
Thank you for your post, Lisa, and for bringing my book STEADFAST into the circle. I am deeply humbled and grateful my work was part of the discussion.
You are so right that Frances Perkins never confused leadership with visibility; I'd go even further and say her brand of leadership was driven by a selfless need to do what was right for the American worker.
As for my own reading list, I've just finished "The Magician's Assistant" by Ann Patchett. What brilliant writing! Like magic, she pulls one rabbit after another out of her literary hat. Now you see it; now you don't. ;)