The Song of the Lark tells a tale of struggle and courage in which a determined protagonist forges a self equal to a wild and outsized land. However, the heroic figure at the center of this story is not a woodsman or an explorer as in most frontier novels. Thea Kronborg is a young girl growing up in a small Colorado town with a "secret something" inside her, and what she must conquer is not a people or a land, but an art. She dreams big and gets what she dreams of: a brilliant success as a Wagnerian soprano.