Pain in love is the Roux family birthright. To my great misfortune, I was once mistaken for an angel. The other problem I have with the way the book is presented is the phrasing of the blurb. To begin with I found the pace quite difficult to settle into, because the narrator jumps between summarising years passing and then goes into intricate detail about individual events. I did really enjoy Emilienne and Vivian’s stories. The novel follows three generations of Roux women: Emilienne Roux, her daughter Vivian Lavender, and her daughter’s daughter, Ava.
She is its narrator, which occasionally stretches belief while she tells us about her grandmother’s inner thoughts and narrates her own conception (?), but the prologue tells us that she considers her family’s history to be her story as well. Which is fine, but for the first hundred or so pages, Ava is not the subject of the story.
The strange and beautiful sorrows of Ava Lavender. It just made me snicker.Īs far as I’m concerned, the way this book is packaged and promoted and sold doesn’t give a proper indication of the book’s contents. In the context of the whole book, I understand what the author was trying to do, but I don’t think it worked. This just made me read it again in disbelief that it was actually printed. I ran my hand across her wings, felt the softness of the feathers course through the tips of my fingers to settle magnificently in my groin. I couldn’t take seriously this sentence from Nathanial Sorrow’s diary, when he touches Ava’s wing: I admit, there were a few sentences and phrases that for me just missed the mark – they were clearly intended to be very serious, but were unfortunately comical. Generally, the language of the book is entrancing. I do not mean to say that this is a bad book. The language is charming and the magical realism is really entrancing. A lot of the stuff written here is what I’ve thought on reflection. The concept of the book: Ava Lavender is a girl born, inexplicably, with the wings of a bird.Ī lot of this review is going to be criticisms of this novel, so before I get there, I do want to make it clear that I did enjoy this book while I was reading it – until Chapter Twenty Three. This will be quite spoiler-heavy beyond a certain point, because I just don’t think there’s any way to talk about my trouble with the book without some spoilers.
I have a lot of thoughts on this book, so, this is your warning.
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