The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender Review

Blurb from Goodreads

To my groovy misfortune, I was once mistaken for an angel

Pain in love is the Roux family birthright. For Ava Lavender, a daughter born with the wings of a bird, it is primal to her fate.

Ava traces the lives and loves of the Roux women as she tries to understand what has made her who she is and what she will become. On the night of the summer solstice, the skies open up upwards, rain and feathers fill the air and Ava'south fate is revealed.

Review

Read in Jan 2016

How do I fifty-fifty begin to write a review for this book????????????

"Love makes us fools"

This book has just come along, stolen my heart and smashed it to smithereens…and I would gladly permit it smash my centre for all eternity… it is simply the most beautiful, near jiff-taking, almost peculiar and most lovingly crafted novel I have read in recent times. I am utterly taken with information technology.

Then what is 'The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender' well-nigh ….
It is virtually a girl built-in with cute wings, about her family, about her mother, her grandmother…near their lives…about their abilities to love with all their hearts….most the sorrows that are seemingly inextricably linked with their loves….and information technology is utterly enchanting.

From the prologue:

"To many I was myth incarnate, the apotheosis of a most superb legend, a fairy tale. Some considered me a monster, a mutation. To my great misfortune, I was once mistaken for an affections. To my mother I was everything. To my father, aught at all. To my grandmother, I was a daily reminder of loves long lost. Merely I knew the truth – deep down, I e'er did. I was just a girl."

On the night of Ava Lavander's birth the birds acted strangely and feathers fell from the sky in the room where her mother was in labour. When she was born she was cocooned in a pair of speckled wings.

Affiliate one starts with a journey dorsum through Ava'south family tree and focuses on the life of Ava's maternal grandmother Emilienne Roux. She was the eldest of iv children, three girls and ane male child.
The linguistic communication is incredibly descriptive and very evocative; it makes it very easy to send yourself within your heed'south center to the scenes of the novel. This is a constant recurring trait of the book…the author is extremely skilled in her use of imagery and the pages of this story really practice come to life as you read.

You have to have leaps of faith when reading this book. If you lot can't believe that a person could plow into a tiny little bird because of the furnishings of beloved…then this book isn't for you. This book is fantastical in its nature and requires yous to open your center, open your mind and take that which we cannot understand. So when Pierette the youngest Roux kid fell in love with a much older gentleman who had a penchant for bird watching, why wouldn't she turn into a yellow canary? This is the start case of birds in the family tree and there are many more feathery incidents scattered throughout the novel.

We quickly larn that Emilienne opened up her heart three times to dear before her 19th birthday and all three loves ended disconsolately with the final dearest utterly breaking Emilienne's middle. 'Dearest can make us such fools' she would say. Tragedy followed these heartbreaks and this tragedy followed Emilienne all her life and filtered into the life of her girl Viviane, on whom the focus of the book so falls. Ane of my favourite lines from the book described Emilienne's emotions as she entered into a loveless marriage with her married man…

"Emilienne silently promised she'd be good to her married man, every bit long as he didn't ask for heart. She no longer had one to give".

The story so follows Viviane'due south babyhood and her path into machismo…it shows her fierceness at staying true to her love. Viviane's story is probably my favourite part of the book. She is a wonderfully complicated character, at times stubborn but always true to herself. Her blinding capacity for dearest in the confront of seeming hopelessness is something to behold. And when she becomes a female parent she learns more than well-nigh herself and what true love truly means…

She learned how to worry. She, who'd e'er idea love'due south only companion was sorrow, learned that worry came hand in hand with love.

When Ava is born she becomes the book'due south featured grapheme. Yet all iii of these women constantly play a role in each other'due south lives; they alive in the same house and therefore their stories don't ever terminate to be told. We see Ava abound from a young daughter and blossom into a person who wants to be seen for more than than her wings….she wants to love.

"I've been told things happen as they should: My grandmother vicious in honey three times before her nineteenth birthday. My mother establish honey with the neighbour boy when she was six. And I, I was born with wings, a misfit who didn't dare to expect something equally grandiose every bit dearest. It's our fate, our destiny, that determines such things, isn't it?"

The story of Ava Lavender actually is the story of the hearts of these women, of Emilienne, of Viviane and of Ava. Each story is beautiful, filled with tearing dearest and deep sorrows with this constant magical chemical element; there is nearly a kind of symmetry between their lives and there is an ethereal majesty to every affiliate of this book. I found myself getting completely lost in the language. Time stood yet equally I read this book.

In that location is a constant sense of foreboding woven throughout the book. I could feel the volume build and build to a soaring climax; there were these letters and clues given throughout the story yet these all seemed nonsensical at the time but fabricated this an accented folio turner. And as the volume'south climax was reached I constitute my eye becoming more than and more filled; I was and then invested in the storyline and in what happened to these characters that I was near nervous for the ending to come… I'm really not explaining this well at all but this book only touched my soul. I felt these women's feelings and their capacity to love unconditionally. I lived their pain. I suffered their heartbreaks with them. I was never one time frustrated past a character or plot development. No this was a beautiful piece of work of what happens to those who are forever ruled past their hearts and take to alive with the consequences of the sometimes sick-advised choices that our hearts brand.

"Viviane stole a glance at Gabe, whose own gaze was lost in the fire's flames. It wasn't that she didn't call up Gabe was handsome. She did. Sometimes she'd take hold of herself studying him – the ease in his grasp every bit he reached for a bowl from the cupboard or the movement of the muscles in his forearms equally he sanded the arched leg of a rocking chair – and she'd imagine how his hands would feel on her skin, the strength behind them equally he lifted her hips to his. But before she got too far lost in her reverie, she'd remember Jack and the world would crash to the ground one time again"

And even though each grapheme seemed to have been touched by a sadness of some sort it never once felt similar too much. Yes I cried, I wept is probably a more accurate description. However these ebbs of sorrow were written with such loving care that instead of feeling an extensive sadness I just found myself taking long pauses, letting everything I had just read sink in…I basically only felt over whelmed past the dazzler of the story and ultimately I felt strangely uplifted. This story reminded me of a traditional fairy tale: otherworldly with a nighttime undertone. Leslye Walton is my new hero. What a magnificent author she is; then gifted with her utilize of words, her ability to set a scene, to write such gorgeously multi-layered characters…even each modest character was gloriously detailed.

I loved everything nigh this book including the gorgeous cover ….It is beautifully elementary and I loved the gilded result forth feather tips. It only fabricated this cover shimmer when it defenseless the light and added to the book's mystique.

Oh delight read this book

Just read this volume, you really owe it to yourself

It is just too cute not to

I do apologise for my rambling nonsensical review…my head is simply in a spin subsequently this book…my center is heavy from all the feels

I beloved this volume. Love it, beloved information technology, love it!

Four and a one-half soaring stars

"merely because dearest don't look the mode you call up it should don't mean you don't have it"

---

SECOND READ: May 2017
Why is it that we fall in love with some books?
And others we don't?
I tin never fully explicate those feelings when I love a book. I can never find the right words to express all that is contained within my heart. Within my soul.

"If my mother kept a list of the reasons she bars me to the house on the hill, she'd accept a length of newspaper that could stretch all the way downward Pinnacle Lane and trail into the waters of the Puget Sound… To put information technology just, my mother worried. She worried most our neighbours' reactions. Would they intermission me with their disparaging glances, their cruel intolerance? She worried I was merely like every other teenage girl, all tender centre and frail ego. She worried I was more myth and figment than flesh and blood… She worried she couldn't protect me from all of the things that had hurt her: loss and fear, hurting and beloved. Most particularly from love."

I read 'The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender' for the commencement time in January 2016. And I utterly loved it. It moved me and so completely. Stirred something deep within me and fabricated me feel so much more than I could ever promise to feel from simple words on a folio. So recently when I had to nominate a pick of book for my Goodreads Volume Group to read it was a given that I would have to recommend this.
So when everyone voted to read my selection I was very excited… at get-go…
But so… The dawn of fear.
What if the volume wasn't as good equally I remembered?
What if was also peculiar? Too dark? Also strange?
Not audacious enough! Non exciting! Disruptive…
I had all of these alien feelings. These doubts.
And sadly I doubted my eye.
I doubted my love.

"Beloved makes us such fools"

And then then I reread my Ava Lavender.
And my feelings… I am both happy and relieved to say they are unchanged.
In fact I love it fifty-fifty more than.
As for my book grouping and what they make of the book? Well if it isn't for them I know information technology will break my heart in some little style. And not because I think I chose the wrong book. Simply because I wish that everyone could feel about this volume the manner I do.
I promise there's a book out there for each person that makes your soul sing like this does for me. All the better if it is Ava Lavender, only if information technology isn't then that's okay also. Only equally long as something touches y'all in the aforementioned way this has irrevocably touched my heart.

five stars

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Source: https://alittlehazebookblog.wordpress.com/2019/07/18/the-strange-and-beautiful-sorrows-of-ava-lavender-by-leslye-walton-book-review/

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