A 2015 Morris Award Finalist
The Roux women's lives have been defined by loves and loves lost. Emilenne, who immigrates with her family from France to Manhatine (Manhattan, naturally) on her larger-than-life father's belief that their lives will be better, loved three times to disastrous results before settling, moving to Seattle, and giving birth to Viviane. Viviane grew up in her mother's bakery, somewhat of an outcast, her only friend being Jack Griffith. As they grew up together, friends became lovers, until Jack went away to college and came back engaged. One last tryst left Viviane pregnant and heartbroken, and it seemed that this history of love and loss somewhat manifested in her twins: Ava, born with wings and initially heralded as an angel, and mute and remote Henry, who didn't speak a word until Trouver the puppy tumbled into their lives. Closed up in a grand house, Ava never wanted for much - she had her mother, her brother, her grandmother, Gabe, who boarded with the Lavenders when Viviane was a teenager and immediately fell in love with her, and best friend Cardigan who lived next door - until she was a teenager and Nathaniel Sorrows moved to town.
This book is beautiful. I'm sort of upset it's YA, because if it were about 100 pages longer and advertised as being for adults, we would be talking about it with the same bated breath as Anthony Doerr and other literary fiction bestsellers. It's a fantastic piece of magical realism (almost too much so at times), full of the different ways love can mean and be expressed. Walton's prose is excellent, full of what my tenth grade English teacher would call beautiful sentences, and her wordplay in naming characters (Jack's wife is named Laura Lovelorn, for example) is fun. It's an excellent debut novel, and I'm looking forward to what she writes next.
(Read as part of YALSA's Morris/Nonfiction Challenge.)
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