The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton
Published: March 25, 2014, Candlewick Press
Genre: Young Adult Historical Fantasy, Magical Realism
Source: From publisher via Netgalley
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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. It’s our fate, our destiny, that determines such things, isn't it?
Perhaps that was just something I told myself. Because what else was there for me – a misfit, an untouchable, an outsider?
What could I say when I was alone at night and the shadows came? How else could I calm the thud of my beating heart but with the words: This is my fate. What else was there to do but blindly follow its path?What drew me to this book was the promise of a story filled with magical realism. After reading works by some of its greatest contributors (Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges, and Gabriel García Márquez, to name a few), I’ve become quite fond of this literary subgenre. The magical realism genre is most commonly associated with Latin American literature, and that’s how I’ve come to associate it. It was with no small degree of excitement and trepidation, therefore, that I set out to read Walton’s debut.
Fortunately, I can attest to the fact that The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender is a quiet, beautifully wrought tale and that does justice to the magical realism genre and also adds a historical United States perspective.
Ava Lavender is born with a pair of wings attached to her shoulder blades. The doctors inform her mother and grandmother that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to remove the infant’s wings, as they are fully attached to her body, veins, tendons, muscles, and all. And so Ava and her twin brother Henry are taken home to live a sheltered childhood with their mother Viviane, their grandmother Emilienne, and family friend Gabe in Seattle during the mid-1900s. But as strange as the circumstances surrounding Ava’s birth may be, they are only a small part of the peculiarities that surround her family.
