Rating: 99% | A+ | ★★★★★ Warnings: + Sexual content Synopsis (from Goodreads): A Life No One Will Remember. A Story You Will Never Forget. 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. Spoiler-Free Section: Anyone scrolling online on a book sub-section of the internet (#booktok on TikTok, #bookstagram on Instagram, the booktube community on YouTube) will have seen The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue a thousand and one times—non-hyperbolically. Released just three months ago, Addie has trounced her literary competitors, vaulting to The New York Times Best Sellers list fewer than three weeks after her publication; she has stayed there since. Those eager for me to create the inaugural negative review for Addie will be sorely disappointed. This is a near-flawless book, and I thank that my past self had the good sense to run out and buy a copy before vendors ran out. (My friend, a few weeks late to the rush, had to impatiently wait more than a week to receive her own copy.) What makes Addie so universally enthralling is not only Addie's story, but also the paradoxical grace and bite of V.E. Schwab's words. According to Schwab, Addie was a decade in the making—and it shows. Each line oozes careful craft and intentional diction, spinning together a story with all of the glamor of a fairytale but also all of the pain that few writers dare to touch. Addie, Henry, and Luc are the rare characters that exist wholly as people, with no additional mental contortions required of the reader. (Click "Read More" for spoilers.) Plot (29/30)
Beginning (9/10) The only serious qualm I have with the plot and the pacing of the plot is limited to the beginning of the novel. Schwab wrangles with dual and dueling timelines which, at the precarious exposition phase of the novel, makes the start of the novel drag at moments. It almost seems as though Addie will never leave Ville-sur-Sarthe, though the reader is keen enough to know that she will. Once Addie finally meets Luc, however, all problems with the plot dissipate—for the reader, that is. For someone like me—bit of a anxious soul—reading about Addie desperately seeking help after her curse and not receiving any of it because her presence would simply be erased from others' memories compelled me to put the book down from time to time to take deep breaths. Not to mention all of the meaningful connection she makes—with Remy, with Toby, with Sam—and the heartbreaking knowledge that they will never remember her, no matter how desperately she tries to make herself permanent. She will use a hundred names over the years, and countless times, she will hear those words, until she begins to wonder at the importance of a name at all. The very idea will lose its meaning, the way a word does when said too many times, breaking down into useless sounds and syllables. She will use the tired phrase as proof that a name does not really matter—even as she longs to say and hear her own. Middle (10/10) I’d suspected something more was at play when Henry remembers Addie. I’d known it was too good to be true, especially with Luc’s attention to detail. But Henry’s recapitulation of his life remains heartbreaking. It is some of the best writing in the entire book, the polysyndeton and relentless commas conveying both urgency and a perverse serenity. Perhaps he decides to go inside, and then he decides to go upstairs, and when he reaches his door he decides to keep going, and when he gets to the last door he decides to step out onto the roof—and at some point, standing there in the pouring rain, he decides he doesn’t want to decide anymore. The reader almost enjoys Henry and Addie’s romps through the city with perpetually bated breath and withheld tears, suspecting—as the characters do not—that something will tear them apart in the end. End (10/10) Addie Larue is the story of broken souls—broken dreamers—coming together. Even Luc taps into his humanity—or whatever saccharine synonym can be used in place of his calculating nature. Or perhaps he doesn’t. Perhaps he covets Addie as an item and a tether and just those things. Running away, for the characters, can only morph into running towards. Delayed punishment is still punishment. But hope prevails above all else, and it saves Addie and Henry in the end. Addie spends centuries working to make herself remembered, to make herself permanent in the creations of others even when she has been long forgotten. Henry drifts about everyday, clinging onto his borrowed time. And at long last, it is The Invisible Life of Addie Larue by Henry Strauss that immortalizes them both, providing a direction for the boy who never knew how to live and a memory for the girl whom no one ever remembered. Characters (30/30) Development (15/15) One may very well imagine Addie as a furiously dynamic character, shaped by the tumultuous historical events through which she has lived. Yet all possibility of major development remains stagnant—until she meets Henry. This is not to say that Addie has no development before she meets her love interest. She morphs from a curious dreamer to a cursed wanderer to a jaded ghost resigned only to quotidian life. But it is not until Henry that she begins to live for something other than spectral artistic influences. Henry forces her to confront Luc—to outfox Luc, once and for all. Henry and Luc develop parallel to Addie, she having as much influence over them as they over her. Addie’s curse, antithetical to Henry’s, finally gives Henry hope that he may live out his remaining days in happiness rather than regret. For Luc, Addie is his only eternal companion; he can toy with the lives of thousands of humans, but his efforts pale in comparison to the friendship—if it can even be called that—Addie offers him. Lure (15/15) Along with dual modern and ancient timelines, Schwab also balances two foils: Henry and Luc. Some authors run the risk of having their female protagonists defined solely by her male love interests; Schwab knows better than to make such an error. Addie, Henry, and Luc are all vehemently unique characters, driving their story at their own paces. Even the minor characters—Rémy, Sam, Bea, Robbie and more—are dazzling, both in their talent and their torment. They are refreshingly real, as is their impact on the protagonists. There is such an earnest sense of “doing your best” among them, an earnest struggle in spite of human caprices. They are real, even when Addie and Henry and Luc are not. He asks Bea if she can work the store. Asks Robbie if he will feed the cat. And they say yes as simple as that, because they do not know it is good-bye. Henry pays the tab, and Robbie jokes, and Bea complains about her undergrads, and Henry tells them he’ll call when he gets back. Writing (20/20) Descriptions (10/10) and Flow (10/10) Schwab’s writing is elegant and heartbreaking. Every phrase seems to sob or shout or laugh its words, emotion underscoring the pages. The reader can feel every second of the ten years spent writing Addie, as well as a decade’s worth of Schwab’s emotions. No one is ever ready to die. Even when they think they want to. No one is ready. He isn’t ready. But it is time. It is time. Closure/Set-Up (20/20) Logic (10/10) and Lure/Closure (10/10) From the start, Addie makes itself difficult to conclude. And yet as the reader reaches the last page, they lean back and wonder to themselves, of course, for how else could it have ended? The ending is Addie’s triumph. Her final mark on the world. It is also Henry’s loss. His reaction to losing her reflects one of the truths of human nature: We are dreamers. We always will be, in spite of and because of the world and its uncertainties—for in those uncertainties lie myriad paths, and as long as we can walk, we will dream. He wrote a dozen different endings for the book, ones where she was happy, and ones where she was not, and ones where she and Luc were madly in love, and ones where he clung to her like a dragon with its treasure, but those endings all belonged to him, and not to her.
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