2018/68: The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender -- Leslye Walton

I’ve been told things happen as they should: My grandmother fell in love three times before her nineteenth birthday. My mother found love with the neighbor boy when she was six. And I, I was born with wings, a misfit who didn’t dare to expect something as grandiose as love. [p. 56]

Ava Lavender is born with wings, and followed by a mute twin (Henry). Her family, French immigrants living in Seattle, are variously strange: there's a great-aunt who transforms into a canary to win the affection of an ornithologist, and another great-aunt who cuts out her own heart, and their brother René who has an affair with a married man and is murdered. Grandmother Emilienne ignores their ghosts, marries, produces Ava's mother Viviane -- who is as 'foolish' (and unlucky) in love as the previous generation. Her childhood sweetheart impregnates her, then marries someone else, leaving Viviane to raise their children -- Ava and Henry -- in an overprotective bubble.

Of course Ava sneaks out to hang out with other teenagers, who are curiously accepting of her difference. Of course she has admirers -- in particular Rowe (her friend's brother) and Nathaniel (a devout Christian who thinks Ava is an angel). Of course things go terribly wrong, and then -- maybe, finally, in the third generation -- blissfully right.

The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender has elements of magic realism: it felt somewhat like an Alice Hoffman novel, though perhaps with a shallower cast. (The men are, typically, driven by lust or violence: the women are, typically, crippled by their hearts.) There is a brutal, and vividly-described, sexual assault which did not seem to fit the tone of the rest of the novel: its shockingness was effective, but it's a cheap effect. (I'd add that this is not only a sexual assault, but a physical mutilation that made me think of an enraged child destroying something beautiful.)

Some beautiful prose, and an epic family migration -- rural France to 1920s New York to Seattle in the Second World War and beyond, all vividly evoked. The magical elements (ghosts, mood-changing baked goods, women who crumble into heaps of blue ash) are fascinating, and the ending surprisingly hopeful. This novel -- aimed, I discovered after reading, at a young adult audience -- seems to have two themes: one is 'love makes us such fools' (where 'us' is primarily 'women'), but the other, depressingly, is 'most men are dangerous'. Too much realism, not enough magic.