The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwabb
France, 1714: in a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world. But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore and he remembers her name.
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This book hit me in ways no other book has and all I wanted to do when I finished was stay in Addie’s world a little longer. If you’ve been online at all in the last few months you’ll have seen this book everywhere. It blends two of my favourite genre’s: historical fiction and fantasy. And it was even more than what I had hoped for. The characters in this story came to life in such unique ways, the plot was perfectly orchestrated, I loved the flashbacks of Addie’s long life, and the writing itself was so beautiful and touching that as I read, I could feel the words sinking into my heart.
Addie’s story was heartbreaking and joyful in equal measures. We follow her through the centuries from her early life and throughout major historical periods till, finally, we join her in 21st-century New York. Her story was not precisely in chronological order but we saw what we needed to see when we needed to see it. And Schwabb did an amazing job of closing any plot holes that would involve an invisible/forgotten girl. Things I didn’t even think about before reading this book. If people forget you as soon as they turn their back, how do you rent a home? How do you order at a restaurant? How do you keep a stable job? When your landlord, your waiter, your boss does not remember who you are or why you’re there? Addie lived three hundred years on the seams of life, never being able to make any lasting connections or settle down. It was heartbreaking. But she also got to see and experience things in the world that no one person ever possibly could in their lifetime which made it wonderful at the same time.
The setting of this novel was amazing. The places Addie lives and visits were described in such vividness that it felt as if I was there with her. It felt like I was there with her beside the stream in her small village in France in the 1700s, I was there with her during the lonely Parisian nights, I was there with her through wars and revolutions, and I was there with her when exploring the hidden allies and streets and shops of a New York that was ever-changing and thrumming with life.
The characterization was phenomenal. Addie was complicated. Having lived so long she was no longer the naive french girl who made her original deal, but neither was she a hardened sceptic who had lived too long. She had so many sides and edges that blended into the perfectly flawed character that she is. Luce was an enigma, throughout the entire novel I never quite nailed down what I was supposed to expect of him. He was unpredictable which made him all the more real, and all the more terrifying. And Henry. Henry was the character I related to the most, maybe because he was the most human of them all. I’ve never read a book where I felt that one person was described so realistically and so similarly to myself. He was probably the most relatable character I’ve ever read. The passage that describes his emotions was the perfect description of what it feels like to live as a highly sensitive person with anxiety: “Other people would call him sensitive, but it is more than that. The dial is broken, the volume turned all the way up.” He was the most three-dimensional character and the perfect example of humanity in this novel.
I highly, highly, recommend this book. It was fun, it was exciting, it was sad, and it was beautiful. If you enjoy historical fiction, fantasy, and magical realism, this book is for you. And if you just enjoy a good plot in general, you can’t go wrong with this one. This was a 5 star read for sure and I believe it has already made the list of my top reads of 2021.