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tamaranth2018/68: The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender -- Leslye Walton
Ava Lavender is born with wings, and followed by a mute twin (Henry). Her family, French immigrants living in Seattle, are variously strange: there's a great-aunt who transforms into a canary to win the affection of an ornithologist, and another great-aunt who cuts out her own heart, and their brother René who has an affair with a married man and is murdered. Grandmother Emilienne ignores their ghosts, marries, produces Ava's mother Viviane -- who is as 'foolish' (and unlucky) in love as the previous generation. Her childhood sweetheart impregnates her, then marries someone else, leaving Viviane to raise their children -- Ava and Henry -- in an overprotective bubble.
Of course Ava sneaks out to hang out with other teenagers, who are curiously accepting of her difference. Of course she has admirers -- in particular Rowe (her friend's brother) and Nathaniel (a devout Christian who thinks Ava is an angel). Of course things go terribly wrong, and then -- maybe, finally, in the third generation -- blissfully right.
The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender has elements of magic realism: it felt somewhat like an Alice Hoffman novel, though perhaps with a shallower cast. (The men are, typically, driven by lust or violence: the women are, typically, crippled by their hearts.) There is a brutal, and vividly-described, sexual assault which did not seem to fit the tone of the rest of the novel: its shockingness was effective, but it's a cheap effect. (I'd add that this is not only a sexual assault, but a physical mutilation that made me think of an enraged child destroying something beautiful.)
Some beautiful prose, and an epic family migration -- rural France to 1920s New York to Seattle in the Second World War and beyond, all vividly evoked. The magical elements (ghosts, mood-changing baked goods, women who crumble into heaps of blue ash) are fascinating, and the ending surprisingly hopeful. This novel -- aimed, I discovered after reading, at a young adult audience -- seems to have two themes: one is 'love makes us such fools' (where 'us' is primarily 'women'), but the other, depressingly, is 'most men are dangerous'. Too much realism, not enough magic.
I’ve been told things happen as they should: My grandmother fell in love three times before her nineteenth birthday. My mother found love with the neighbor boy when she was six. And I, I was born with wings, a misfit who didn’t dare to expect something as grandiose as love. [p. 56]
Ava Lavender is born with wings, and followed by a mute twin (Henry). Her family, French immigrants living in Seattle, are variously strange: there's a great-aunt who transforms into a canary to win the affection of an ornithologist, and another great-aunt who cuts out her own heart, and their brother René who has an affair with a married man and is murdered. Grandmother Emilienne ignores their ghosts, marries, produces Ava's mother Viviane -- who is as 'foolish' (and unlucky) in love as the previous generation. Her childhood sweetheart impregnates her, then marries someone else, leaving Viviane to raise their children -- Ava and Henry -- in an overprotective bubble.
Of course Ava sneaks out to hang out with other teenagers, who are curiously accepting of her difference. Of course she has admirers -- in particular Rowe (her friend's brother) and Nathaniel (a devout Christian who thinks Ava is an angel). Of course things go terribly wrong, and then -- maybe, finally, in the third generation -- blissfully right.
The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender has elements of magic realism: it felt somewhat like an Alice Hoffman novel, though perhaps with a shallower cast. (The men are, typically, driven by lust or violence: the women are, typically, crippled by their hearts.) There is a brutal, and vividly-described, sexual assault which did not seem to fit the tone of the rest of the novel: its shockingness was effective, but it's a cheap effect. (I'd add that this is not only a sexual assault, but a physical mutilation that made me think of an enraged child destroying something beautiful.)
Some beautiful prose, and an epic family migration -- rural France to 1920s New York to Seattle in the Second World War and beyond, all vividly evoked. The magical elements (ghosts, mood-changing baked goods, women who crumble into heaps of blue ash) are fascinating, and the ending surprisingly hopeful. This novel -- aimed, I discovered after reading, at a young adult audience -- seems to have two themes: one is 'love makes us such fools' (where 'us' is primarily 'women'), but the other, depressingly, is 'most men are dangerous'. Too much realism, not enough magic.
