The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
Author: V. E. Schwab
Publication date: October 2020
Publisher: Tor Books
V. E. Schwab’s Addie LaRue gives readers a girl who sells her soul to keep her life. Addie is trapped in the confines of 18th century French womanhood - in short, being told to be a person she does not wish to be in a place she does not wish to inhabit. When offered the ability to change her circumstances, Addie seizes the bargain. What she does not realize are the terms and conditions; in exchange for immortality, Addie gives up the essential human need to be remembered. Addie is disconnected from the very world in which she is now permanent - until one day, a young man in a bookshop remembers her name.
Schwab writes with a fluid mix of accessible narration and almost poetic expression. Her writing is so clean and artful that her introduction - a genuine account of a defining time in the author’s life and the origin of Addie’s story - almost seems part of the novel. That style remains consistent throughout the book. Schwab’s attention to detail, in drawing both her characters and the places they inhabit, knits meticulous connections between the timelines she conjoins. She questions the defining boundaries of love with a protagonist who is somehow both permanent and temporary, rendering the feeling as equally limited and timeless. Along the same line, Schwab’s expression of history as a sometimes lucky, sometimes perfectly executed mesh of ideas, enables an exploration of the characteristics that keep us human. The story itself is the capstone of this sometimes whimsical, sometimes weighty concoction. The resilience, creativity, and compassion that Addie develops as a result of her curse are reminders that even when isolated, all people share some measure of suffering, of joy, and of willpower. Romance readers will find a lot in this novel that provokes and unsettles our conceptions of passion and of love. Fantasy readers will enjoy the lovely central conceit of Addie’s existence as a living ghost, granted immortality at the cost of the essential reciprocity of human connection. All readers may find haunting beauty in the author’s exquisitely crafted narrative of Addie’s long, lonely journey to knowing herself and being known.
