The Strange & Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye J. Walton (review)

Ava Lavender, born with the speckled brown wings of a bird, tells the history of her family, starting with her great-grandparents, who moved from a small French village to New York in 1912. Most family members met with tragic fates: one of her great-aunts transformed herself into a canary, another cut out her own heart after giving birth to her sister’s fiancé’s child, and her great-grandmother literally faded from view into a pile of blue ash. Ava’s grandmother, Emilienne, moved to Seattle, where she gave birth to Ava’s mother and earned a reputation as a witch. This remarkable, magic-laced family history continues and spreads to other members of Ava’s Seattle neighborhood to produce a gauzy narrative of love and loss, heavily tipped toward loss as relationships flounder on the shoals of misunderstanding, greed, and obsession, with Ava herself ultimately suffering rape and mutilation. The ghosts of Emilienne’s brother and sisters, as well as the former inhabitant of their house, warn of a danger to Ava that is misunderstood until it’s too late, and Ava’s story draws to a highly ambiguous close. Sensibility overrides sense in this intentionally artful tale; though the ethereal nature of the storytelling is appealing, it occludes narrative clarity and cohesion, and the result is a mood without an object. Ava’s repeated insistence that she is just a girl despite her mystical history and physical anomaly is borne out by her vulnerability and her desire to be loved; sensitive readers may be able to draw their own threads of significance through her narration and the references to works such as Like Water for Chocolate and One Hundred Years of Solitude.