The Strange And The Beautiful Sorrows Of Ava Lavender Book Review

The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

i finished this late last night , i didn't update anything here , It felt like the light of my phone would be somehow offensive , would somehow disturb the aura the book created ..

i just closed the book , turned the light off , adjusted my pillow and slept with a smile

because that was quite an End .

“To many, I was myth incarnate, the embodiment 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 angel. To my mother, I was everything. To my father, nothing at all. To my grandmother, I was a daily reminder of loves long lost. But I knew the truth—deep down, I always did.
I was just a girl.”

the strange and the beautiful sorrows of ava lavender , just the name can tell you a big deal and deceive you a big deal too

the strange and the beautiful , the sequence of these two words is so fitting for the book was both of these but more of the first
it was weird and odd and contained the type of magic that's subtle and with weaving it all together it never felt logical nor out of place. the type of lovely oddness , where a sad baker’s pastries can make customers weep for days, or where hope can fill one so full as to literally expand several inches to withstand it.
But still , that lovely oddness is a double-edged sword, I tend to find most people fall into either the “madly love it” category or “couldn’t connect to it” category with little in between.

though in fact i find myself in these " little in between " category , I really liked the book , it has the type of charm that you continue reading ,continue liking it even if your skeptical self is nagging , but you know , the fact that the skeptical you is nagging , it means that you are not in the " madly in love with the book " category .
its a matter of time that you start criticizing

the second part of the title though , of ava lavender is not quite accurate because its a generation’s saga , the title suggests that this is a story about Ava Lavender, but we end up reading about her entire ancestory .
we read the stories of Emilienne Lavender (her maternal grandmother), Viviane Lavender (her mother ) , and then ava's
but not like i object , these stories didnt bore me , i liked them and i enjoyed reading them even more than reading ava's story

so the book starts with the roux family moving from France to Manhattan and crazy things would happen , that ava's grandmother would end up on her own , all family dead as results of " love makes us foolish " thing , with one of her sisters turned into a canary bird and she , married to connor lavender , a crippled man whom she thought wont be able to leave anywhere was the reason she married him , emmelinne with conner settled in seattle , she hunted by the ghosts of her family and he busy with the bakery , i think one of the saddest moments of this book was the one when connor lavender died , it felt like an uncompleted story .
vivaine was born and she too had her own story with her childhood friend , jack Griffith , and ended up heart broken too

By this point Viviane Lavender had loved Jack Griffith for twelve years, which was far more than half of her life. If she thought of her love as a commodity and were, say, to eat it, it would fill 4,745 cherry pies. If she were to preserve it, she would need 23,725 glass jars and labels and a basement spanning half the length of Pinnacle Lane.

If she were to drink it, she’d drown.

the last was ava's story , the girl born with wings , with a twin who refuses to speak ,Henry ,
the story here i think lacked the conflict and it was rushed a bit for the " main story of the book " thing , with the evangelical stalker obsessed with Ava and her wings. nathaniel , who's obviously a psycho , and her two friends Rowe " stammering cute Rowe " and his sister cardigan ..

the end of the story was perfect in my opinion , many reviews complained that they expected a great love story for ava , something to compensate all the broken hearts in the path of the story , that off-course wasn't there
for me i think , the story ending with ava cutting her strings of fear, growing wings and flying on her own is the perfect end , because there is this fact , a great love story wont compensate , these women didnt need true love to salvage them , they just needed their way out of that haze .
and that's a beautiful message the book is sending

BUT is it enough ? after all these women being treated as if objects ? we can all recognize the sexism the book presents , dont we ? so THAT'S what I meant saying skeptical me was nagging .

my mind couldn’t ignore the common situations women went through here : loveless marriage, single parenting, sexual abuse and rape , etc. like really nobody did anything against it, they passed all unnoticed , do you think the way it ended with nathaneil was the end he deserved ? he just disappeared and thats barely a metaphorical punishment that would give the right message .
For each of them , these women , naivety is both their charm and curse. It’s their hope, willingness to give their hearts with complete blind unhealthy trust that leads to their heartbreaks and These weren’t healthy behaviors. These are the kind of things that have serious consequences.
Emily Dickinson once wrote: ‘”Hope” is the thing with feathers’, and I think that’s what this novel has at its heart like a treasured secret. they all hoped for true love , Ava wished as much by her hope – that she will be happy and accepted .
But but all that love and beauty and hope had no value the moment they crushed into those who craved them from others selfishly ..

as viviane had smells for everything , she smelled happiness and broken hearts , i may have colors for things , as the word Africa seems yellow for me , my best friend feels like the color orange and my brother is aquamarine , while Elias viturius of An Ember in the Ashes , the last book i finished , felt like navy blue .
i have a color for this book too and that's Purple , i was enveloped in mauve and lilac and violet , its felt so purplish that's why its so beautiful , because purple is somehow ... Soothing
But we shouldn't get lost in the fluff of this book as it has so many layers underneath that demands our attention and shouldnt go unrecognized .

The cover of this book is so beautiful , a piece of art , the blue and yellow and the single feather , just so beautiful

all in all , its a delicious pastry of a book that i liked though i had some issues . issues that i needed time and thinking to recognize thats why i changed my rating from 5 to 4 .
It holds a meandering sort of narrative, one which lovers of Big Fish or Amelie movies may adore. i couldn't but imagine ava as Audrey Tautou .
written with a lyrical prose that maintains a traditional fairy tale feel despite the sorrowful themes. whimsical, filmed with dazzling virtuosity, the type that you may love when it sizzles and when it drizzles all the same .



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