Double Review: Ava Lavender & Geography

I haven't written an actual review in a while, so I figured it was time. I'll make this a two-review post, though, because I have two books I want to review and not a whole lot to say about either of them. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because one is getting a good review and one is getting a mediocre review.

First up: The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton

★★★★★
Source: Galley from Candlewick

Plot overview from Goodreads:

Foolish love appears to be the Roux family birthright, an ominous forecast for its most recent progeny, Ava Lavender. Ava—in all other ways a normal girl—is born with the wings of a bird. In a quest to understand her peculiar disposition and a growing desire to fit in with her peers, sixteen-year old Ava ventures into the wider world, ill-prepared for what she might discover and naïve to the twisted motives of others. Others like the pious Nathaniel Sorrows, who mistakes Ava for an angel and whose obsession with her grows until the night of the Summer Solstice celebration. That night, the skies open up, rain and feathers fill the air, and Ava’s quest and her family’s saga build to a devastating crescendo. First-time author Leslye Walton has constructed a layered and unforgettable mythology of what it means to be born with hearts that are tragically, exquisitely human.

My coworker put this book in my mailbox in, like, October, and I didn't touch it until last week. I don't know why. I mean, magical realism! That's my thing! I knew it was going to be good-- she's got good taste, this coworker of mine, but her taste is so very different from mine that she hardly ever makes recommendations for me. So if she thinks we'll *both* like a book? Well.

The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender is a novelty of narration, if you ask me. It's told by Ava Lavender in a strange and beautiful omniscient first person. Omniscient first person? But how? And before you ask, no, she's not psychic. You see, Ava tells this story as kind of a research paper on her family. She starts all the way back with her great-grandparents, and through her we get to know every member of her family from that generation until her own. Her reflective voice doesn't lend itself much to dialogue, and the chapters are rather long, but there's a magic woven into this book that makes it fly by. The style is thought-provoking and leaves little nuggets of foreshadowing and parallelism that will thoroughly please both YA and adult readers (there's an argument to be made that this book shouldn't be marketed as YA but, rather, as an adult book, but I take offense to that idea. Young adult readers are perfectly capable of appreciating a book like this, and adult readers will just have to get rid of their prejudices against YA literature and read it without being catered to. If they don't, it's their loss.)

I can't say enough about the characters, either. None of them are characterized in that exaggerated-yet-subtle way that I love so much, but the focus here is more on their stories than their personalities-- and rightfully so. Emilienne Roux/Lavender has evaded love since it destroyed her family. Viviane Lavender has spent her life waiting for her first love to come back to her. And Ava Lavender? She's been hiding from a world that could never let her be what she wants to be: normal.

Because she was born with wings, and everyone will be afraid.

Because everyone else was born without wings, and she's afraid.

If you were looking for a book about one protagonist, look somewhere else. This is a book about a whole family, the way their hearts bind them and set them free, the way a family is a family no matter what it looks like. It's about people who are broken, keeping themselves together. It's about the strange and beautiful nature of love in all its forms-- foolish, catastrophic, innocent, destructive, familial, pure, obsessive, misguided, restorative love.

And finally, the prose. I would say it might be the best thing about this book, but I truly can't decide. I'll just say the prose is lyrical, like a mix between Lauren Oliver's style in Delirium and Markus Zusak's in The Book Thief. At the same time, it's something all its own. Here, have some quotes if you don't believe me:

"She spent her days trying to forget the sound of his voice, and her nights trying to remember."

Don't you feel like you just got slapped in the face?

"And that might just be the root of the problem: we're all afraid of each other, wings or no wings."

If you don't want to read this book by now, I can't help you. But I can leave you one more quote:

"Fate. As a child, that word was often my only companion. It whispered to me from dark corners during lonely nights. It was the song of the birds in spring and the call of the wind through bare branches on a cold winter afternoon. Fate. Both my anguish and my solace. My escort and my cage."

Next up: The Geography of You and Me by Jennifer E. Smith

★★½
Source: e-galley from Hachette

Plot overview from Goodreads:

Lucy and Owen meet somewhere between the tenth and eleventh floors of a New York City apartment building, on an elevator rendered useless by a citywide blackout. After they're rescued, they spend a single night together, wandering the darkened streets and marveling at the rare appearance of stars above Manhattan. But once the power is restored, so is reality. Lucy soon moves to Edinburgh with her parents, while Owen heads out west with his father.

Lucy and Owen's relationship plays out across the globe as they stay in touch through postcards, occasional e-mails, and -- finally -- a reunion in the city where they first met.

A carefully charted map of a long-distance relationship, Jennifer E. Smith's new novel shows that the center of the world isn't necessarily a place. It can be a person, too.

Okay, I'll try to keep this short since the first review was longer than I expected. To be quite honest, I was disappointed with this book. Usually I fly through Smith's books in a few hours and feel totally satisfied with the experience, but this time something was missing.

I think it's my sister's fault.

When she read The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight and This is What Happy Looks Like, my sister pointed out how much these books would benefit from being told in first person rather than third. I was taken aback, because I've always loved that they were written in third. But why?

I think I only liked it because it was different. Most contemporary romances like this are written in first, and therefore these ones are automatically set apart. But I've come to realize that there's a reason those ones are written in first-person: we need to feel attached to at least one of the characters.

Don't get me wrong, I cared enough about Lucy and Owen to keep reading, but something stopped me from fully buying into their story. I was keenly aware of the third person this time around, and felt like it distanced me from them-- especially when weeks or months took place between chapters and they had to update me on their lives. As the reader, I don't think I should feel like I need to be updated on the main characters' lives. In one chapter, Lucy's meeting a new guy, and in the next chapter she's been dating him long enough to casually attend his rugby games as the supportive girlfriend. When did that happen?

Something about all the traveling in this book made me uncomfortable, too. Both of the characters were extremely attached to their homes before their lives were uprooted, and I didn't feel enough of the homesickness. Owen's father allowing him to move from school to school in his senior year as they traveled by car across the country was not only irresponsible but seemed inauthentic to his character: I simply don't believe that he would have done it. I don't believe that Owen would instantaneously feel detached from his childhood home when his mother died, or that he would refuse to love New York and then open his heart to every single other city they moved to. I don't believe that Lucy felt anything for the cities she visited or lived in with her parents, because I was only given tourist reasons to enjoy those cities. When Lucy was talking about New York, she could go off about her memories and the idiosyncrasies of the elevator for an entire paragraph, and that's what made it home. There was nothing like that for Edinburgh or London, both of which she seemed to accept as her home way too quickly.

My last gripe is that a lot of what I loved about Smith's previous books was that the main characters spent so much time together and getting to know each other-- even if it was just a plane ride, Hadley and Oliver had a chemistry that I couldn't put my finger on-- and Lucy and Owen did not. They had one night, and then postcards. Postcards, where you can write maybe five lines at a time (and they never took up all five lines). If they had ever used the word "love" with each other, I would have said it reeked of, dare I say it, insta-love.

All of this said, I'm giving the book 2.5 stars because, well, it had its moments. I liked the references (Bartleby!) and the characters weren't bad, nor was the plot per sé. I just felt like it focused too much on the characters' histories and issues and not enough on who they are, and why they're right for each other. 

I could round up and give this 3 stars, but I'd prefer not to.