Review: THE STRANGE AND BEAUTIFUL SORROWS OF AVA LAVENDER by Leslye Walton

So.  I recently read this incredible book called THE STRANGE AND BEAUTIFUL SORROWS OF AVA LAVENDER by Leslye Walton.  It’s taken me a while to figure out how to review this book.  Because I have so many thoughts on it.  And it’s hard to sum up a book that takes place over several generations, with the main character shifting over time, but with the narrator staying the same.  So sometimes the narrator — one strange girl named Ava Lavender — is telling the story of a character who is a great-great-grand-relation of hers from decades in the future.  And sometimes she’s narrating her own story of tragic loss.

Candlewick Press, March 2014.

This book has a lot of tragic loss.

And yet, with all that loss, this book is beautiful.  The language is beautiful.  The bread in Ava’s grandmother’s bakery is palpably fragrant, every time a character steps into the shop.  The rain falling in the Pacific Northwest smells like saltwater and earth.  And Ava, a girl born with wings to an unwed mother in the 1940s, is almost a song of a character.

This book is clever and dynamic.  I often wondered to myself (and to friends who were reading or about to read or who had already read the book because honestly it’s a book you HAVE to talk about) why this book sold as YA.  Because it would do equally well labelled as magic realism and shelved in adult literary.  It speaks to teens, though.  It speaks to people.  And there were scenes that were so hard to read, but I turned the pages anyway.  Because this book spoke to me.

Leslye Walton is an author to watch.  If you haven’t picked up AVA LAVENDER yet, you really ought to.  It’s a fantastic read.  I hope it speaks to you, too.