Book: The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender
Authors: Leslye Walton
Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy, Magical Realism;
Pages: 301 pages
Format: Hardback
Goodreads rating: 4.12
My ratings: 4 stars
Online Store: Bookdepository
My Review:
Every time I went to choose a book from my shelf I looked at this one and never felt drawn to it. It looked to me like a cute young adult book and I had lost interest in it since I first bought it over a year ago. But this month I decided that I needed to read some of my old tbr books and that’s how I started The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender.
The whole book is told in Ava’s perspective and her telling us the life stories of her grandmother, her mother and herself. The writing instantly made me see this book differently, it’s very poetic and with raw, even “adult” descriptions which are rare in a young adult book.
The book focuses mainly on love tragedies, death and misfortunes. There’s a lot of signals throughout the book that will come to the story after to explain some actions. Everything has meaning and since this is a magical realism book it may not please people that are not able to let themselves believe in this book what usually is not possible in reality.
The character development was good but not great. There’s a lot of feelings, objects and expressions that define each character which gives them personality but something was lacking. I wasn’t able to really care for any of them to the point that this small sized book actually took me some time to get through.
I was determined to give this a three star rating and consider it an average book, enjoyable but not memorable, until I read the ending which instantly made me connect so much more with the story and see the beauty in it.
It talks more than just death and tragedies. It speaks about forgiving, surprassing bad times and what real love looks like. I’m glad I picked this up and it really made me realise that some stories are more than what they seem to be.
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