Mon coeur entier pendant ma vie entiere 
 My whole heart for my entire life 
 This book is a gorgeous love story. All the more gorgeous because it's a tragic love story. 
 This book is an inter-generational tale of the women of the Lavender family. Starting, and ending with, Ava Lavender. The girl born with wings. Ava tells the story of the women of her family, plagued and haunted by foolish love. It starts with Emilienne, her grandmother, who moved to America from France with her family. She finds love three times and loses it three times. She also loses all the members of her family in horrific ways. Because of this she has closed herself up, even to her daughter Viviane. 
 Vivane finds love once with her childhood sweetheart. And loves him long after he leaves her. With him she had two children, the twins Ava and Henry. 
 Okay - the book seems simple when you try to explain it like that. It really isn't simple. It's character driven, yes. But it manages to grasp all the darkness there is to love that no-one tries to tell you about while highlighting all the types of love that people have in their lives that they don't seem to notice. It's about loss and how people deal with it in their own ways. 
 The writing is beautiful. I feel so lucky to have read two books in a row that have the most eloquent prose. In fact I think this book is really very similar in style to The Weight of Feathers and there's also the same feathers/bird references and very subtle, illusive magic or strangeness in them both. 
 The only reason for me that this book hasn't got the five stars in that I think that the climax of this book was a little wrong for the style of story. I'll talk about it more after the jump because there will be spoilers but I just feel like it didn't quite make sense and then all the repercussions of it were quite rushed and glossed over. Maybe it's because I've been reading A Little Life which really shows the after effects of that situation on a person so deeply and well that this just felt like this book barely spoke about it - actually I don't really think it did. I think they could have had a more emotional climax or a true coming of age moment for Ava instead. 
 Other than that I found this book flawless. I love the slight magic of them all. I love books about families. 
 I think that this book would be for fans of Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. They are very similar in style, especially as it goes through the lives of the different family members. 
 (view spoiler)[Okay, now for that spoiler. I know that there was a bit of a lead up to the attack on Ava but I just felt like it was a plot line that was really out of sync with the rest of the story. It was so dark and violent - and I just felt like the rest of the ending was just super glossed over. Like Walton has tried to pull it back from such a dark place and in the end has just ended up not talking about it. There is literally no mention of her being raped besides the sentence that describes it. Not even Ava mentions it. I just feel like that would feature somewhere in her thoughts. 
 I thought that maybe the confrontation or climax of the novel should have been maybe something like a confrontation with her mother or with the townspeople and Ava using as a chance to be her own person and finally break free of the fear her mother encased her in. I just thought that the attack was really a bit of an unnecessary plot ploy to give the story drama - but it really didn't need it at all. The story was compelling enough anyway because the characters all all interesting! (hide spoiler)]