Lark in the Morning

by Nancy Garden

Seventeen-year-old Gillian, finding that the thieves who broke into her family's vacation house are two young runaways terrified of being sent back to their abusive parents, decides to help them hide out from the authorities.

Genres: LGBT, Young Adult, Queer, Lesbian, Fiction

227 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1991

About the author

A versatile writer, Nancy Garden has published books for children as well as for teens, nonfiction as well as fiction. But her novel Annie on My Mind, the story of two high school girls who fall in love with each other, has brought her more attention than she wanted when it was burned in front of the Kansas City School Board building in 1993 and banned from school library shelves in Olathe, Kansas, as well as other school districts. A group of high school students and their parents in Olathe had to sue the school board in federal district court in order to get the book back on the library shelves. Today the book is as controversial as ever, in spite of its being viewed by many as one of the most important books written for teens in the past forty years. In 2003 the American Library Association gave the Margaret A. Edwards Award to Nancy Garden for lifetime achievement.

In Remembrance: Nancy Garden

Reviews

[Lydia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting story of a teen who discovers a girl and her brother who have been hiding near her parents summer house. The main character has a female lover but one she does not really trust with her secret about the children. While this is a young adult story and it actually features teen lesbians, that is not the central theme of the story.

This story felt very old school to me and I really enjoyed the feel and timber of the story.

[Bella · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a hard time reading books where kids make their lives harder by refusing to tell something to their well meaning parents, or when problems could be solved with some communication. And in this book, the eventual conclusion, while it felt earned, could have been solved a lot easier than it was. That all being said, this book is lovely and Garden's descriptions of lake life made me want a lake house.

[Megan]

I will finish this book. I love Nancy Garden. It's just too sad right now.