The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender Review

This week's book is The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender, magical realism by Leslye Walton.

This story follows three generations of women.  Emilienne, a French immigrant to Manhattan, closes her heart to love after she's betrayed by her betrothed, two of her siblings die, her mother becomes incorporeal, and her sister turns into a parakeet.  Viviane has a sweet childhood romance with Jack, the boy next door, and can smell the rain coming.  Ava, the narrator, is born with wings.

This book helped me put my finger on why I love magical realism: this is my tall-tale spinning Texan granddad's genre.  It reminded me so much of his stories and of my mother's stories about my family.  At times while reading this, I could hear the cadence of his speech.

"In his haste to flee the unpleasant scene, Rene ran out into the street, forgetting to take his clothes with him.  As he ran through the shop-lined blocks toward his family's apartment, he was followed by a growing crowd of women (and a few men), all wrought with hysteria over the sight of Rene Roux's naked buttocks.  The frenzy quickly escalated into a full-fledged riot that lasted four and a half days."

My granddad said you should do work you'd do even if they didn't pay you.  So he worked for the phone company, riding the trains.  A man sat down next to him one day--a tall man with a sad, lean face--and my granddad told him he looked troubled. The man sighed and nodded, confiding that his job was running him ragged and that he'd lost faith in this great country of ours.  "I'm sorry to hear that," he said.  "But you got it all wrong."  He then proceeded to go on about how this was the land of opportunity, how men fought and died for the freedoms we enjoy, and how it would be wrong of us to take their sacrifices for granted.

The part that got me about this story was the part that he didn't say, but my mom told me in her own stories.  Life was not kind to my granddad.  As a child, he was hit by a car, backed up over, then hit again, putting him in a coma for two weeks.  (When he woke up, he asked for a glass of water from the fountain outside his room.  He had heard people talking about it while he was in his coma.)  As a teenager during the depression, he and his mother were homeless.  (They snuck out of hotels without paying.  They stayed with single, female relatives who wouldn't allow my granddad in the house, so he slept on the back porch.)  He pulled himself out of poverty by joining the army during WWII, (where he filled in the holes in the pavement at Perl Harbor.  Where they once stopped the train to fire a machine gun into a field, then went through the field, collecting the quail they'd shot), where they fixed his lazy eye and sent him to college on the GI bill. 

The man on the train listened, his face clearing and some of the shadows fading from under his eyes.  As the train came to a stop, the man said, "Thank you.  You're absolutely right," stood up, put on his stovepipe hat, stepped out the back of the train, and gave the Gettysburg Address.

So I really responded to this book.  It has a family history, told with an ambiguity that makes it either magic or a funny hyperbole.  And that combination hits all my nostalgia buttons.  

***

Next week: urban fantasy with Shadowshaper by Daniel Jose Older.