(Please forgive the self-promo. The LA Times Book Review is kind of a big deal, especially for children's books, which don't get reviewed much in the big papers.)
Not Just For Kids: 'The Unwanteds' by Lisa McMann
The author colorfully takes on cuts in school arts by creating a world in which creative children are separated from the pack in a classic tale of good versus evil.
By Susan Carpenter, Los Angeles Times
August 28, 2011, 7:00 a.m.
The Unwanteds
A Novel
Lisa McMann
Aladdin/Simon & Schuster: 390 pp., $16.99, ages 8-12
As public school districts across the country get butchered with all the sensitivity inherent to a rusty hatchet, parents are processing the loss in novel ways. Take bestselling author Lisa McMann, who brainstormed the concept for her middle-grade debut "The Unwanteds" after art and music classes were cut from her children's school.
Artistic kids were being punished, believed McMann, who reimagined their punishment as something other than the real-world decline of imaginative thinking. In "The Unwanteds," every resident in the bland, mostly colorless community of Quill is marked as Necessary, Wanted or Unwanted (if they sing, paint or dance), in which case they are shackled, taken to a death farm and forced to face the Great Lake of Boiling Oil.
This annual ritual, or purging, takes place when children have reached the inauspicious age of 13. By then, their parents and other town members have observed each individual's tendencies to determine if a child can stay in Quill, with its "identical houses planted closely together like rows of sweet corn," or needs to be banished...
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More at the link:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-lisa-mccann-20110828,0,2965246.story 
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