Book Review: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab
Okay I know this is a cliché, but if you graphed out my interest level in The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (author: V.E. Schwab) as I progressed through it, the graph would look like a little roller coaster. It would also look the standard normal distribution (if you know me from grad school you will understand this reference). Like this:
Sorry about the graph. I wrote this post late at night and for some reason I thought that would be a great idea. Now that I spent like 20 minutes creating the graph I can’t go back though, so please enjoy.
What I am trying to say is that for the first ~150 pages or so of this book, I wasn’t that into it. I found the basic premise pretty depressing. Our protagonist, an uneducated 23-year-old woman named Adeline (Addie) LaRue, who was born in the 1690s in rural France, is being forced into an arranged marriage. Desperate to get out of the engagement, however, she prays for a miracle.
Luckily, or maybe unluckily, an evil god, who is named Luc for some reason, shows up and agrees to give Addie her freedom. Unfortunately, the deal comes at a steep price: not only do her fiancé and family forget she was supposed to get married, they forget who she is entirely. And so does every person Addie will ever encounter again.
Oh also, one key detail is that Addie has seven freckles on her face that look like stars. Why is that important, you ask? I am not really sure, but you will hear that description approximately 40 times in the book.
So the reader travels with Addie through 150 pages and about as many years of a very challenging and lonely life. Addie is subjected to a lot of horrible things since everyone forgets who she is the moment she is out of their eyesight. I felt like this section of the book could have been cut by about…110 pages. It started to feel repetitive to me. Time and time again, you read about Addie meeting someone she likes, then them forgetting her the next day. Or Addie being chased out of inns or stables because people can’t remember why she’s there. Somehow, in all this time, Addie never figures out how to game the system enough to lock down a permanent living situation, so she has to figure out a new place to sleep every single night for 150 years (that’s 54,750 places to sleep, but who’s keeping track?).
However, we start flashing forward to the present day (2014) in New York City, and this, for me, is when the story starts to pick up. One day, Addie, who is now 300+ years old and hasn’t made a single friend since the early 1700s, is remembered by a man named Henry. Of course, he is handsome and brooding and he works in a bookstore! But I have to say, even though I kind of saw this plot point coming, I still loved it. For the next 200 or so pages I couldn’t put the book down. Addie and Henry go on dates, fall in love, and it seems like those seven freckles on Addie’s face have turned from stars to star-crossed lovers.
Then we start to uncover some dark secrets about Henry’s past, and this is where the graph I included above started to dip down for me again. Like I wrote in my review for Life After Life (a book that, interestingly, Henry mentions in Addie LaRue), the story just dragged on too long for me. The descriptions got repetitive, I didn’t need to keep being verbally reminded that nobody ever could remember Addie, and I definitely didn’t need to keep being told that Addie had “seven freckles like stars” (I know I have already mentioned that twice but that’s still about 1/20th of the number of times it’s mentioned in the book).
Overall, this was an entertaining read, but not my favorite. I felt like it borrowed a little too heavily from past works with similar themes, namely Life After Life, mentioned above, and the movie The Age of Adaline, which is literally about the same thing, an immortal woman named Adaline (albeit with a slightly different spelling).
I really like books that make me think and reflect on broader themes, and this one didn’t make me do that. For example, The Immortalists made me contemplate how much our perceptions of our destinies actually shapes the way our lives turn out. Life After Life made me think about the impact seemingly inconsequential decisions can have on our futures.
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue didn’t make me reflect in those ways. My biggest takeaway was that Addie had seven freck— just kidding, I guess my biggest takeaway was that it would be pretty depressing to live for 300 years with nobody ever remembering you, and that I’m glad that will never happen to me.
Rating: 2 stars
Rating Scale:
5 Stars: I love this book!!!
4 Stars: Pretty good
3 Stars: Good
2 Stars: Not for me
1 Star: Truly dislike