Why you need to read The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue Published by Tor Books ISBN: 0765387565
on October 6th
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Historical, Romance
Pages: 448
Read it as: Hardcover
Source: Purchased
My rating:
Check it out in Goodreads
Synopsis

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.

Let first just say: I really, truly enjoyed this book.

But it took me close to two months to finish it.

I wasn’t too worried, because I had read previous reviews that indeed talked about how this story needed to be savored, and that it took time. So I took my sweet time!

Let me tell you how I feel about it in more detail.

I really enjoyed the soul of this book

From reading the synopsys, even though it sounds quite exciting and interesting, I wasn’t really sure what this was about. Is it about her trying to get ouf this ‘curse’ she got stuck with? About her confronting the god she made that deal with?

Those were the first conclusions I jumped to. And while there’s definitely some of that, the story’s main conflict isn’t really about it. For me, it was about finding meaning in your life, in this case through art, creation and imagination.

I feel like this book echoed the questions and struggles we have in our own lives, even if ours are significantly shorter than Addie’s. This theme is carried over to even Henry’s own story -the other character in the book- and he doesn’t have forever.

We want to know that we are not wasting our time, that we’re leaving a mark and won’t be forgotten.

This is what makes Addie’s situation so heartbreaking, and her deal so bittersweet. She gets all the time in the world, but… to do what? How can it really be a life if you can’t share it, or leave a mark?

The story addresses these questions in a really beautiful way. And I’m not sure what the author meant the answers to be, but I like the idea of our impact on other people being relevant too. That the people we meet and our interactions with, even if they don’t remember us, count as a mark if we make them count.

But I wasn’t too crazy about the flashbacks and the pacing

This is tricky because the flashback sequences in the book are very important for us to know Addie’s story throughout history. But even though I understand why they were there –and the author did something really clever with them, you need to read the bok to see!-, they still slowed down the story so much.

Flashbacks are flashbacks, and the other time jumps just made it hard to focus on the main timeline.

It’s weird because I’ve read Vicious, also by this author, and it’s all time jumps, but those are quite punchy and you never lose sight of the main goal, so it works amazingly. In The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, the sequences in the past felt like what they are: exposition. They weren’t part of the current story, so they inevitably got in the way.

I really wish there had been a way to still have those encounters Addie experienced and have that window into her evolution through the ages, but without it dragging the story down.

That would be my only hangup with the book

Overall, I would very much recommend Addie’s story, and who knows, maybe V.E. Schwab will decide to revisit it some day!

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