After years of research into her strange family's strange history, Ava Lavender is ready to share it with us.
She was born with wings, wings with brown speckled feathers. Her brother Henry was unusual, too--he disliked being touched, and he didn't speak (at least not to living people) until he was a teenager.
Their mother, Viviane, could put a smell to everything, including happiness and people. The boy she loved as a child and a teenager left a mark on her neck where he kissed her.
Her mother, Emelienne, perceived much more of the world than most people, and took it all to mean things. Even resolving to not love people couldn't stop them from dying, it seemed.
Her mother, known only as Maman, faded into a pile of blue ashes. She had lost everything.
Beginning with her grandmother's childhood in France and carrying the story through to her own life in Seattle, Ava Lavender's family history involves many secrets uncovered and mysteries solved.
The message of this books seems at first to be a very strongly negative view on love. The majority of the characters die because of love. The Roux family moves to Manhattan from France because Beauregard believes it would be better for his family. It isn't. The death of every character who dies is because of love. Even when Emilienne thinks that trying to not love someone will stop them from dying, it doesn't. The horrors that characters have experienced because of love that ended badly cause them to try to keep their children from loving anyone, even when it might be good. But the eventual appearance of positive love makes you realize that Walton's real message might be that love can be a lot of things. We see death and misery in the beginning, and it never completely goes away. But as the book progresses, the joy and lasting goodness becomes apparent, both to the readers and the characters. Near the end, Emilienne, the most injured by love of any Roux/Lavender, reflects on "the scars all love's victims carry" (280). But Ava, who exists because of the disasters of love, feels that it can end better than it has for her ancestors. Even after the worst night of her life, she wants to see the boy she loves. This flow from the evil to the beautiful side is truly well-done.
This unfolding of the ways of love carries along the plot, which reflects the current take on love in every way. The book's beginning is gloomy, but it ends mostly with happiness. The climax comes right at the point when love-is-good and love-is-bad are most at odds, most struggling for dominance over each other. The theme and the plot weave and cross and work together in a captivating dance. Sometimes they trade places. They are always reflections of each other. Motifs apply to both.
Walton's voice is absolutely lovely as well, so I am definitely looking forward to further books by her. She's well-suited to her genre.
The only thing that bothered me a bit was how long it took to get to Ava's story. It's definitely important to know about Emilienne and Viviane before getting on to Ava, but it often seemed like Walton couldn't decide which story to tell. Each woman's segment didn't exactly have a feeling of being a prologue to Ava's life and ended up as mini-books in themselves. The plot map for this book would look really weird.
Ava Lavender is a challenging book to talk about without giving away a lot. Partly that's because so much happens before Ava, but Ava is so important that you can't not mention her story. Also, it's because a lot of the book's greatness centers around things that happen later in the plot.
In short, I would recommend this book to anyone, really. It's wonderful and unusual--strange and beautiful, you could say. (By the way, the "Sorrows" bit in the title is a rather grim pun.)