Lark:

My rating: 3 1/2 out of 5 stars.

A girl is taken, stolen. A gymnast, diver, ballerina, best friend and baby sitter is kidnapped from curbside out side her gym. She's tied to a tree and left to die, having already been beaten, stabbed and bruised. Lark never thought she'd be one of those girls from the news. The ones making sadistic headlines, Missing Girl Found Dead; but she did, she made headlines and the entire town skipped a beat, only a beat.

When Lark finds that her soul cannot move on from the tree she'd died tied to, she reaches out to her old best friend Eve and Nyetta a little girl Lark would babysit. She needs only for them to look. If they see what happened and understand her death Lark will be free. 

Potentate in its realism, stark in its ferocity, and somehow mangled with rigid lyricism. I absolutely devoured the entire short read. I felt at one point that my heart had frozen, been brittled over with littering cracks running the entire length of it, for surely not more could hurt after this novel. The descriptive nature of which Porter portrays three separate yet interwoven lives is awe-inspiring and at points left me breathless. I was so thoroughly stunned to the point at one interval that I glared down at the book silently cursing its existence then tossed it onto my bed determined to no longer read it anymore.

Porter's writing style is something of a unique quality, it is fluid and richly descriptive, while complex and unnerving. At some point I thought it might hold a bit of prose in it for the rhythm of the novel seem to pulse with the beat of a good freelance poem.