Paula McLain has built her reputation on illuminating women’s stories that history nearly forgot. From Hadley Hemingway in The Paris Wife to Beryl Markham in Circling the Sun, she excavates lives that deserve remembering. With Skylark by Paula McLain, she ventures into her most ambitious narrative structure yet—a dual timeline spanning nearly three centuries, connected by the limestone tunnels beneath Paris and the unbreakable spirit of those who refuse to be silenced.
A Tale of Two Parises, One Thread of Resistance
At its heart, Skylark by Paula McLain interweaves two narratives of survival against impossible odds. In 1664, Alouette Voland, the daughter of a master dyer at the Gobelin Tapestry Works, discovers a revolutionary blue dye that could change her life—if only the guild would acknowledge that a woman could create such brilliance. When her father is imprisoned and Alouette herself is sentenced to the notorious Salpêtrière asylum for “hysteria,” she must find allies among the forgotten women trapped behind those grim walls and discover whether freedom is worth any price.
Nearly three centuries later, in Nazi-occupied Paris, fifteen-year-old Sasha Brodsky watches her family arrested during the Vel d’Hiv roundup of July 1942. Released through a bureaucratic error, she finds refuge with her neighbor, Dr. Kristof Larson, a psychiatric resident who knows the city’s greatest secret: an underground network of tunnels that could lead refugees to safety. As Kristof guides Sasha and three other Jewish teenagers through the darkness beneath Paris, their journey becomes a descent into both literal and metaphorical underworlds—places where the past speaks to the present in whispers carved into stone.
McLain’s structural ambition is evident from the opening pages, where a 2019 prologue set during the Notre-Dame fire reveals a mysterious blue glass fragment bearing the mark of a skylark. This framing device promises connections that the novel delivers with surprising emotional resonance, though the mechanics of these revelations occasionally feel overly orchestrated.
The Weight of Color and Memory
Skylark by Paula McLain demonstrates the author’s meticulous historical research, particularly in her rendering of 17th-century dyeing practices. Alouette’s chapters pulse with the dangerous alchemy of color—the toxic arsenic that produces her signature blue, the guild politics that determine who can create and who must merely serve, the sumptuary laws that make wearing certain colors a crime for those not born to privilege. McLain captures the visceral reality of Alouette’s world: the stench of the Bièvre River thick with chemical runoff, the steam-choked washing rooms where women labor until their hands bleed, the terrifying walls of Salpêtrière where thousands of women are imprisoned for the crime of being inconvenient.
The 1940s timeline carries equal historical heft. McLain draws from firsthand accounts like Hélène Berr’s journals and Maurice Rajsfus’s documentation to create an intimate portrait of Jewish teenagers caught in history’s undertow. Sasha’s devotion to memorizing Ovid’s Metamorphoses—building a memory palace in her mind where no one can confiscate her learning—becomes a profound metaphor for intellectual resistance. Her transformation from sheltered student to underground refugee mirrors the mythological metamorphoses she studies, where survival often demands becoming something new.
The underground Paris that connects these timelines is rendered with remarkable specificity. McLain consulted cataphile guides and explored the tunnels herself, and this research shows in every description of quarry chambers, collapsed passages, and the eerie beauty of spaces human hands carved centuries ago. The tunnels function as both literal escape route and symbolic space—a place beneath the surface where outcasts and refugees have always found sanctuary.
Character Depth and Emotional Complexity
Where Skylark by Paula McLain truly succeeds is in its character work. Alouette emerges as a fully realized protagonist whose hunger for creative freedom feels both period-specific and timeless. Her relationship with her absent mother Henriette adds psychological complexity—the legacy of maternal abandonment shapes Alouette’s fierce independence even as she struggles to trust others. Her romance with Étienne, a quarryman who shares her working-class status, develops with genuine tenderness rather than melodrama. Their scenes together capture the ache of connection formed under impossible circumstances.
Sasha’s characterization is equally nuanced. McLain resists the temptation to make her preternaturally wise or heroic. She’s a fifteen-year-old girl whose world has shattered, and her responses feel authentically adolescent—the way she notices Gérard despite her terror, her occasional petulance with Maurice, her desperate clinging to the Latin verses that give her fractured world structure. The supporting cast of teenage refugees—Maurice’s bravado masking fear, Annette’s quiet devastation, Gérard’s steady kindness—creates a believable community of young people learning to survive together.
Dr. Kristof Larson serves as the crucial bridge between past and present. His own losses and his complicated relationship with the enigmatic Alesander (who guides the escape through the tunnels) add layers to what could have been a stock “rescuer” role. The reveal of Alesander’s true allegiances provides one of the novel’s most effective plot twists.
Structural Ambitions and Their Costs
The dual timeline structure, while ambitious, creates uneven pacing that may frustrate some readers. The alternating chapters mean that whenever one narrative builds momentum, we’re yanked into the other timeline. This works better in the novel’s second half, when both storylines accelerate toward their respective climaxes, but the first third occasionally feels stop-and-start.
Key strengths of the narrative approach:
- The thematic parallels between imprisonment and freedom resonate across centuries
- Underground spaces become portals where past and present speak to each other
- McLain avoids heavy-handed connections, trusting readers to draw their own parallels
- The epilogue (set in 1857) provides satisfying closure to Alouette’s legacy
Areas where the structure falters:
- Some readers may find the 1664 chapters more immediately compelling than the 1940s narrative
- The connection between timelines, while poetically rendered, relies heavily on coincidence
- Certain secondary characters (particularly in Sasha’s timeline) remain underdeveloped
- The pacing in Alouette’s Salpêtrière chapters occasionally slows to document historical details at the expense of narrative momentum
The Language of Transformation
McLain’s prose demonstrates significant evolution from her earlier work. While The Paris Wife favored clean, direct sentences, Skylark by Paula McLain embraces more poetic language, particularly in Alouette’s chapters. Descriptions of color achieve genuine lyricism—the way twilight-silk brocade shifts “from deep, rich blue to the purple of an iris bloom,” or how Alouette’s revolutionary dye blooms “like light on water.” Occasionally this poeticism tips toward overwriting, but more often it serves the novel’s themes of beauty emerging from darkness.
The Sasha chapters adopt plainer prose appropriate to a teenager’s perspective, though McLain infuses them with Latin quotations from Ovid that add textural richness. The Metamorphoses references never feel forced; they emerge organically from Sasha’s character and provide thematic commentary on transformation and survival.
Historical Fiction with Purpose
What distinguishes Skylark by Paula McLain from generic historical fiction is its clear-eyed engagement with how power operates across time. The mechanisms that imprison Alouette—the guild’s monopoly on knowledge, the pathologizing of women’s ambition as “hysteria,” the economic systems that trap the poor—echo in the bureaucratic apparatus of Vichy France that categorizes, registers, and ultimately attempts to exterminate Jewish citizens. McLain draws these parallels without being didactic, trusting that her readers can see how oppression adapts its methods while maintaining its essential nature.
The novel’s feminist lens feels earned rather than imposed. Both Alouette and the women she meets in Salpêtrière—Marguerite the nurse, Sylvine the widow—are imprisoned for behaviors that threaten male authority. Their escape from the asylum becomes an act of resistance against not just individual cruelty but systemic misogyny. Similarly, while the Holocaust narrative focuses on a male rescuer, McLain ensures that Sasha’s agency and intelligence drive much of the plot. She’s not simply rescued but actively participates in her own salvation.
Minor Criticisms Worth Noting
For a novel that succeeds on so many levels, a few weaknesses deserve mention. The romance between Alouette and Étienne, while well-written, follows somewhat predictable beats—the meet-cute by the river, the single night of passion before separation, the tragic circumstances that keep them apart. Readers familiar with historical romance will anticipate most of these developments.
The 1940s chapters occasionally sacrifice character development for plot mechanics. Alesander’s backstory, revealed late in the novel, might have benefited from earlier development. Some supporting characters in the underground journey remain types rather than fully realized individuals—though given the novel’s length and dual focus, this represents a necessary compromise.
The ending, while emotionally satisfying, resolves perhaps too neatly. The 1857 epilogue showing Alouette’s legacy preserved in stained glass provides beautiful closure, but some readers may find it overly tidy given the novel’s generally unflinching depiction of historical brutality.
A Worthy Addition to McLain’s Body of Work
Skylark by Paula McLain represents both continuation and evolution for this author. Like her previous novels, it centers women whose contributions history has marginalized. Unlike those earlier works, which focused on single biographical subjects, this novel creates entirely fictional protagonists whose stories illuminate broader historical truths. The ambitious structure doesn’t always succeed perfectly, but its reach demonstrates McLain’s growth as a novelist willing to take risks.
For readers who appreciate Skylark by Paula McLain, several similar works merit attention:
- All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr—for its dual WWII timeline and lyrical prose
- The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah—for its focus on women’s resistance during the German occupation
- The Invisible Woman by Erika Robuck—for its exploration of female spies and underground networks
- The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith—for its multigenerational art narrative
- The Girl in the Blue Coat by Monica Hesse—for its YA perspective on Amsterdam’s resistance movement
Skylark by Paula McLain deserves recognition as a thoughtful, beautifully researched novel that illuminates forgotten corners of history while asking urgent questions about freedom, creativity, and resistance. While not without flaws—its ambitious structure occasionally works against narrative momentum, and some romantic elements feel familiar—the novel succeeds in its primary mission: giving voice to those history tried to silence. McLain has crafted a story that honors both the power of art to survive and the courage required to create in a world determined to confine you. In an era when book bans proliferate and women’s autonomy faces renewed threats, Skylark by Paula McLain feels both historically important and urgently contemporary.