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Laci Barry Post

Character Profile: Ava Stilwell

Updated: Sep 8, 2020


For those of you who have read Songbird and Song of Return, do you have an image of Ava in your mind? If you are like me, I am always creating mental pictures of characters when I read. Many times a movie of a book will come out, and I will be disappointed in the choice of actors when they do not match my preconceived images of the characters.

Today, I want to show you what Ava looked like. I modeled her looks mostly after my grandmother. These are two pictures of my grandmother, Joyce Paris Barry, when she was a young woman. The first is a school picture, and the second is a picture she had taken in Anniston, Alabama for my grandfather when he was in the army. She was beautiful then and now!

“Her shoulder-length hair was an enormity of dark-brown, wavy curls that leapt and fell about her oval face and petite shoulders when she sang. He could tell that she possessed a passionate and vivacious spirit by the way her voice escalated over the verses and by the brilliancy of her gray eyes. They were large for her face and were light- colored pools of emotion. As he looked into them with the rest of the picnickers, they conveyed that she was young, expectant, and believed in life, love, and God, all things that he himself had begun to question.”

Songbird, Chapter 2


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