“Wendi Stewart’s Meadowlark is lyrical and vivid, startlingly fresh writing about childhood and loss, decaying dreams, bravery and the everyday brutality that is sometimes visited upon the damaged and the innocent alike. It is about the fast, inviolate friendships that see us through. Stewart creates characters that will last. Here is ultra-wise and propulsive writing about all the small dramatic moments that loom large and make us quake.”
~ Lisa Moore, author of Caught and February

“Meadowlark is a stirring debut about three young friends captive to the choices adults make and the secrets they keep. At the tender heart of this book is the refreshingly fierce Rebecca Archer pushing back against the isolation of grief and neglect, the betrayal of forgetting. In pitch-perfect prose, Wendi Stewart delivers a nuanced, visceral portrait of small towns and family farms, memory and identity, and most achingly, the liberating beauty of friendship.”
~ Krista Foss, author of Smoke River

“In this evocative coming-of-age novel, Stewart’s characters find a way to challenge the confines of the world they inhabit. Powerfully rendering life in small town northwestern Ontario, Meadowlark grips a reader from first page to last.”
~ Anne Simpson, author of Falling and Loop

“Meadowlark is an impressive debut novel that encapsulates the heartache and immediacy of young lives upended. In Stewart’s evocative depiction of Rebecca Archer, we meet a girl who is willing to be different, to be brave, to beat back against unspeakable tragedy without losing tenderness.”
~ Fran Kimmel, author of The Shore Girl

“Wendi Stewart’s Meadowlark is at once a manifesto of grief and a testament to all that can be gained when there’s nothing left to lose. This novel drew me in gently and never let go—not even after I had read its final passages. Stewart writes with beautiful, painful honesty about the divide that can exist between parents and children, the resilience that must be cultivated once innocence is lost, and the redemption that can be found through friendship and love. Her observations about childhood are clever and graceful. It’s a rare book that makes me cry and laugh the way this one did.”
~ Marissa Stapley, bestselling author of Mating for Life

“Stewart's story reflects self-discovery in the midst of suffering. Meadowlark is a novel of tragedy infused with hope and survival.”
~ Kirsten Parucha, Quill and Quire

“Wendi Stewart has a smart and compelling heroine in Rebecca Archer.”
~ Chelsea Rooney, National Post

“Meadowlark is remarkable for its distinctive, clear-voiced, endearing young characters ... a very promising debut.”
~ Dana Hansen, The Winnipeg Review

“Read it for Wendi Stewart’s powerful evocation of loss and for the hope held throughout that these orphans will find some escape.”
~ Jade Colbert, The Globe and Mail

“Meadowlark fully explores the social dynamics between men and women, girls and boys, adults, and children, and generations; it considers the opportunities we are given or held back from because of circumstance, and directly challenges the age-old phrase, ‘bloom where you are planted.’”
~ Sabrina Uswak, FreeFall