Finch Reviews The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton

Title: The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender
Series: Stand-Alone
Publisher/Year: Candlewick Press, 2014
Genre: YA fantasy (supposedly)
How Finch Got It: Her friend's mum bought it for her at Vroman's Bookstore.

 

 Synopsis  

Foolish love appears to be the Roux family birthright, an ominous forecast for its most recent progeny, Ava Lavender. Ava -- in all other ways a normal girl -- is born with the wings of a bird. In a quest to understand her peculiar disposition and a growing desire to fit in with her peers, sixteen-year-old Ava ventures into the wider world, ill-prepared for what she might discover and naïve to the twisted motives of others. Others like the pious Nathaniel Sorrows, who mistakes Ava for an angel and whose obsession with her grows until the night of the Summer Solstice celebration. That night, the skies open up, rain and feathers fill the air, and Ava's quest and her family's saga build to a devastating crescendo. First-time author Leslye Walton has constructed a layered and unforgettable mythology of what it means to be born with hearts that are tragically, exquisitely human.

 

 

Epistolary Review

 

Dear Leslye, 

I am shocked to the soul and unsure if I will ever recover. 

Your novel starts off reminding me of traditional fairytales in their purest forms before being sanitized for the presumed fragility of young minds. I may have a young mind, but it must learn about the grim realities of life at some point, and I would choose to learn these things no other way than surrounded by delicious, lyrical prose. 

The intertwining history present in Ava Lavender is about love, yes, but it is not about faith or hope or "omg, first crush!" It is about all the scars love leaves on its victims, about relentless suffering, obsession, murder, suicide, and loss. It is shockingly dark and exquisitely tragic, an intricate weave of fantasy and reality sewn around three generations of women: Emilienne, Viviane, and finally Ava Lavender. It is a chronicle of their entwined loves and sorrows, which bear on one another in unexpected and regretted ways.

The first two hundred pages or so of the book is surprisingly well-done magical realism. It is Marquez-esque in its generations of family that culminate in Ava's birth. Like Scorpio Races, the context is more of the book than the plot itself, but the writing is elegant enough that it distracts you from the lack of true plot. Even more so that the writing, the mood deep and deluded and glorious. There is something deliciously ugly about living for someone who does not love you, about realizing you no longer love someone, about having no one to love. Ava Lavender gracefully explores isolation, desire, beautiful things, unusual things, grotesque things, the fragility of innocence and the various methods and facets of human love.

But, Leslye, the climax of the book was just far too much violence in an already dark and violent tale. Ava was already filling out her skin and wings, embracing all that she was, and her daily life taught her more than a brutal, unnecessary tragedy like her rape and mutilation by an evangelical stalker in a house full of dead and tortured birds ever could. You may have imagined you were giving us foreshadowing with a one-sentence mention of Nathaniel's revolting feather-related behaviour (not that I wanted to hear more about it) and Henry's constant repetition of the same four sentences. I feel required to tell you that none of this indicated anything so savage as Ava's assault.

And then, after subjecting us and Ava to such a horrible and aimless disaster, you veer off into a sudden return to typical, cliche, and astonishingly unrealistic YA plot! Her wings have just been cut off with an axe, and after a few months of lying in bed and her boyfriend returning from college, she's suddenly completely healed, identical emotionally to her earlier self, and ready to return to her life? Leslye, up until then you were expressing the effects of incredible, painful suffering so accurately!

To conclude, Leslye: for the first two-thirds of Ava Lavender, you have concocted an elegant and grim primitive fairytale of a book, portraying incredible pain, macabre magic, and the sometimes awful realities of love. Then, suddenly, the mantle and crust warp and shift into a conglomeration of brutality and surrealism and ridiculous attempts at a "happy ending"; disgraceful, degenerative, disappointing, and disrespectful to women who have gone through such a horrible experience.  I don't understand why any of this was necessary, Leslye: the climax and resolution seemed fruitless, abrupt, and extraneously cruel.

See, Leslye? When you're not subjecting poor Ava to disturbingly gory emotional and physical scarring, you have a true gift for passionate and fantastical, if dark, prose and exquisite insight into the influence of emotion on human lives.

First enchantedly, then disturbedly,
Finch

Verdict