The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab – 442 pages
Book Blurb:
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.
My Review: 4.5 stars
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue takes you through three-hundred years of adventure of our heroine, Addie LaRue. This fantasy driven work reminded me of The Time-Travelers’s Wife with an added twist. I’m so glad I went in blind for this one. It was the brilliant recommendations from many other reviewers that led me to buy the book.
Schwab has masterfully woven a story that makes the reader think about what does it mean to be remembered? How does it feel to be forgotten? What does it cost to be loved? Be careful what you wish for because in this book, deals are made and cannot be broken. Addie is a dreamer and has hopes far wider than her life in Villon, France in 1714. She leaves her intended at the alter and as she wanders the woods, she meets a shadow of a man that sets her deal in motion.
There is no doubt that the writing in this book was superb. Each sentence, often succinct, which in itself is unusual in such a long book, was filled with thought and meaning. There was symbolism peppered through the pages, a bit of foreshadow and an overall sense of satisfaction. I read this book in chunks. I really had to absorb what had happened, sit on it and then go back for more. Although I’ve done this before with other heavy and thought-provoking books, like A Little Life, this time I think I took too long to finish. I was anxious to finish and rushed through the ending. That was my mistake.
Many supporting characters will charm you and the descriptions of places like New York, New Orleans and Paris over a three-hundred-year time span was well done. I loved the theme of art throughout the book and how Addie played a role in so much of it. This book will stay with me for some time.
Quotes I liked:
Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives–or to find strength in a very long one.”
“Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To be remembered. And to forget. Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings poems, films. And books.
“What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind?”
“Being forgotten, she thinks, is a bit like going mad. You begin to wonder what is real, if you are real. After all, how can a thing be real if it cannot be remembered. It is like the Zen koan, the one about the tree falling in the woods. If no one heard it, did it happen?”
“March is such a fickle month. It is the seam between winter and spring—though seam suggests an even hem, and March is more like a rough line of stitches sewn by an unsteady hand, swinging wildly between January gusts and June greens. You don’t know what you’ll find, until you step outside.”
“Live long enough, and you learn how to read a person. To ease them open like a book, some passages underlined, and others hidden between the lines.”
