*This review will contain spoilers*
I can't remember when or where I purchased The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender. All I know for sure is that this one has been sitting on my shelf for a long time. I picked it up this month as part of my quest to power through some of the young adult novels I have piled up in my room. I'm sure that the beautifully designed cover was what drew me to it in the first place. In person, the edges of the feather illustration glimmer and shine, making for a very pretty image. The lyrical and unusual title is intriguing as well. The inside flap promises a magical realism tale about a girl born with the wings of a bird. That sounded pretty interesting to me, so I started reading expecting something special and quirky. What I ended up with was disappointingly common and ugly.
The story is narrated by a young girl named Ava Lavender, but the story is actually a generational tale about her entire family. It begins by describing the life of her great-grandmother, Maman Roux, then continues on to describe her grandmother Emilienne's life, then her mother, Viviane's life. The stories of all three of these women are rife with tragedies, deaths, and broken hearts. The Roux women tend to be unlucky in love, with murders, cheating partners, and untimely deaths ending their romances prematurely. As a result, none of these women know how to love in the long term, and keep their hearts closely guarded. Their stories are full of what things could have been, if only death and heartache didn't follow them everywhere.
Elements of magic are woven throughout their lives as well. Emilienne is unusually perceptive, and able to see signs and symbols in the most mundane occurrences. She also can see the ghosts of her siblings, who each meet with tragic ends over the course of the story. They try to tell her things and she tries not to hear them. Viviane has a magically intense sense of smell, which allows her to do everything from forecast the coming of the seasons to tell when a woman is pregnant. These instances of magic are treated with a casual disregard by the characters. It's just how things are, and they accept them. The stories of Ava's ancestors take up about two thirds of the novel, with Ava herself being born around the halfway point.
Once the focus of the novel shifts to Ava, details of her own tragedy begin to emerge. She is part of a set of twins, each of whom are born different. Ava has a set of wings like a bird, and her brother Henry is autistic. In an effort to protect her children from a world she knows to be cruel and uncaring, Emilienne keeps them confined to their home most of the time. Ava doesn't really mind this, as she is very wary of how the outside world would react to her feathery appendages anyway. Eventually however, she grows into a teenager and becomes more curious about the world outside. She begins venturing out at night with her best and only friend from her neighborhood, Cardigan Cooper.
Her nocturnal wanderings are the innocent sorts of adventures teens typically get into. She meets up with other kids at a party hangout, drinks a little, and kisses a boy. Unbeknownst to her, she also manages to catch the attention of Nathaniel Sorrows, a man who recently moved onto her street to help an ailing relative. Nathaniel becomes obsessed with Ava and her wings after seeing her pass by his house a few times and begins laying plans to get her alone. His intentions for her are evil, and when he finally succeeds in drawing her in, Ava's turn with disaster comes.
I started off reading this happily enough - I didn't mind the generational storytelling, and there's no denying that Leslye Walton has a way with words. Ava's narration is written like a fairy tale. It has an old-fashioned feel to it that makes you comfortable, like how you would feel snuggled up in bed, being read to as a child. The magical elements only furthered this feeling. Incredible events, like a girl turning into a bird or a ghost trying to send someone a message are treated as such commonplace occurrences that you come to regard them as common as well and truly fall into the setting. I had a little trouble discerning what the overall plot would be at first, and was puzzled by how little Ava was in the book, but I didn't mind that so much when I was having fun exploring the strange world that Walton created.
My patience started to run out as I got to the tragedies. All of the Roux women in the story suffer terribly at the hands of men. Their hearts are broken irrevocably and they don't function normally in the world afterwards. I quickly became frustrated at how the women in the story were so weak, pining away after lost loves instead of actually living their lives. As the plot meandered on from sorrow to sorrow, I started getting confused about which bad thing was happening to which woman. Lots of extra backstory passages for minor characters started showing up too, further confusing matters.I found myself putting this book down a lot to do little things like check Facebook or read my email. I had trouble staying engaged without a clear plot to follow, and it wasn't enjoyable to read about so many troubling events in a row. Magic without whimsy or wonder is an odd combination, and one that I found out that I don't really care for.
When Ava and Nathaniel Sorrows finally became the focus of the story, I assumed that I would get a clearer picture of what the overall plot of the novel was supposed to be, but I found that I still wasn't able to figure it out. The sorrows for Emilienne and Viviane kept coming, and Ava's story remained a bit vague. Walton provided plenty of foreshadowing to let you know that something bad was going to happen to her, but I still felt like the story was scattered, and that not enough attention was paid to the girl who was supposed to be the main character.
Eventually, I made it to the end of the story, and its brutality and ugliness stunned me. My little criticisms about pacing, clarity, and cohesiveness fell away and were replaced by the disgust and horror I felt at what happened to Ava. Nathaniel finally succeeds in luring Ava into his home, where he brutally rapes her and hacks off her wings with an axe. He very nearly kills her. This is all described in unflinching detail. It was terrible and difficult to read. Compared to the lyrical storytelling of the previous 250 pages, this was a slap in the face, and it felt wrong. I detest when sexual violence is used as a plot point. This was not necessary to the story or appropriate for this novel.
I've read several teen novels that dealt with sexual violence in thoughtful and careful ways. This was not one of them. This was merely violence for the sake of violence. Its only function was to continue the run of broken hearts in the Roux family by showing another man damaging another one of their women, this time in the most intense and destructive way possible. There are a few pages at the very end of the novel showing Ava beginning to heal from the attack and move on, but as so little time was spent on Ava's development throughout the story, those pages don't feel genuine or rewarding to read. It was a terrible, terrible ending. It's not really "strange and beautiful" for a woman to be raped. It's depressingly common.
When I make it to the end of a novel I don't really care for, I can generally find something positive to say about it. I am usually happy to have read it, even if the best thing I can say is that I got to try something new. I'm having trouble doing that in the case of The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender. I don't know who this was written for. Its plot is meandering and scattered, its treatment of women is less than ideal, and it features graphic sexual violence. It's meant to be for young adults, but I can't put this in my classroom library. I wouldn't want my child to read it. I'm not glad I read it. Aside from some pretty wording, this was a miss for me. Disturbingly, I am in the small minority of readers with this opinion. This book has phenomenal reviews on Goodreads. I don't get it.
There is one positive in all this however- this was my last read for the TBR 2017 Challenge. I've officially read 60 books I'd had sitting on my shelf since last year.
Challenge Tally
TBR Challenge (previously owned): 60/60 - Complete!
Total Books Read in 2017: 75
No comments:
Post a Comment
So, what do you think?