I just wanted it to be over, knowing it was not going to offer me any sort of awesome plot twist or satisfying conclusion, so that I could go download something else! Some people seemed to really like it, but if you care about a strong story and characters, look elsewhere. It's like a really long, twisted bedtime story. When bad things happen, as they inevitably do, you are not surprised or upset. You never really care about her she is little more than the character who happens to narrate the story, nor are there any other characters you are really rooting for. It was an interesting premise in which Walton created a lot of interesting exposition and back stories but the story of Ava Lavender itself falls flat. It is a fairly grown up story with lots of violence, etc, which doesn't bother me in the least, but the language is immature, almost like a fairytale at some points and so simplistic as to draw attention to itself and this strange contrast of content and style-not incredibly well written (of course, I think listening makes this more noticeable and especially in the absence of a captivating storyline). I, like some other reviewers, found it on a list of YA novels to watch out for. In a story filled with ghosts and a girl born with wings, the item that prevented the suspension of my disbelief was the crappy historical sociology. The small bakeries that survived from the 1950s onward did so by replicating Americans' taste for cheap, chemical products during this era. Post war food industrialism killed neighborhood food artisans, one of which the protagonist's grandmother is supposed to be. In fact, I couldn't help but think in the back of my mind the whole time that the story was set in a time period that was death for American bakeries. Please don't describe another chocolate cake. Why was it set in a bakery? Why all the lengthy expositions on baked goods? Listen, I love a bakery as much as the next guy, but at points I felt like enough was enough. I found the whole bakery sub theme to be distracting and annoying.

Still, it was a cool story with a few bad points in execution. So that colors my experience in a negative way. As for the book itself, well, I probably wouldn't have bought it if I had realized it was in the 'Young Adult' genre. So the vocal performance of this book was pretty good.

The beautiful sorrows of ava lavender