Words? I don’t have them.
My breath was taken away and I will argue till my deathbed that I will never be the same again. Though, it was for the best.
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue tipped my world and made me realize just how short life is. We don’t get second chances (unless you believe in reincarnation) and this book reminded me to live it.
I know that sounds very cheesy (I’m cringing right now as I write this) and I also know that plenty of people found this book to be lame (including some of my friends)…
However, if you find yourself wondering if you’re wasting away your life or if you feel like you could be doing so much more, I HIGHLY encourage you to pick up this book.
If that is true for you and you still hate it, then I permit you to mentally curse me out.
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab
Published October 6th, 2020
Genre: Fantasy, Romance, Historical Fiction, Adult
Pages: 448
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 Summary
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue was an emotional rollercoaster: happy, sad, anxious, happy, depressed, and it goes on.
Adeline LaRue begins as a young girl living in Villon, France. She spends her early life in a village where everyone who is born there will die there as well.
The mundane life expected of women drove Addie insane. She loathed the thought of that someday becoming her life. At the age of 23, she is thrown into an arranged marriage which doesn’t last past the wedding.
Fleeing before having to walk down the aisle, Addie runs away to a river she has loved since childhood. Here is where she has prayed to the gods for a better life, one where she can be free.
As the village closes in on her, still in her wedding dress, Addie prays one last time. She prays for someone, anyone, to answer her, to save her.
What she didn’t notice was that amid the chaos and her racing thoughts, was that the sun had set, and like her favorite village outcast once warned her,
“Never pray to the gods that answer after dark.”
In comes Lux, the devil-like entity that grants Addie her wish to experience the world in exchange for her soul. However, Lux had no intentions of making her new, immortal life easy.
Over the next three hundred years, everyone Addie meets is doomed to forget her the moment a door is closed or she escapes out of sight. That is, until Henry Strauss.
The book follows Addie from 1716 France, to Italy, to then Germany, to eventually 2014 New York, USA. Over this time we watch Addie as she experiences adventure, grief, loss, anger, and love.
Spoilers
Addie’s biggest wish was to live before she would die.
As a young woman living in the early 18th century, she didn’t need magic to tell her what she already knew. Soon enough, she would be stuck living the same life as the women around her: a caretaker stuck in the same old village until death.
Her fierce yet stubborn spirit never died out, even when she had eaten, slept, and breathed death, war, and grief.
Luc is constantly trying to convince Addie to give in, to let him help her rest and put her out of her misery. He wants her to surrender but Addie refuses to give up her soul to Luc until she’s seen it all.
Three centuries of awkward morning hello’s and “who are you?”s and suddenly a boy in a book store remembers her.
In comes Henry Strauss, a grad student drop out, working in a bookstore. During Addie’s attempt to steal a book, he catches her arm and confronts her. The next day when she goes to return the copy as if she wasn’t just there, he says three words Addie hadn’t heard in over three centuries,
“I remember you.”
We learn that he made a deal too, with Luc nonetheless. A soul for a year of being needed, wanted, and loved by those around him for nothing but simply existing. The seemingly simple request turned Henry’s life into hell.
Knowing the love he’d receive would never be genuine, he learned to stop trying. Everyone he met would think the world of him but the gray hue in their eyes would remind him none of it was real.
That is until Adeline LaRue tries to steal from him but all he sees in her eyes in color.
Henry Strauss’s desire to be seen and Addie’s desire to be remembered made for a damming pair.
Fate brought them together, but like anything else, time would tear them apart.
Final Thoughts
This book made me laugh, cry, gasp, all of it.
I was constantly forgetting that I was reading and I found the relationship between Henry and Addie to be both breathtaking and heartbreaking.
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue will live rent-free in my mind for the next few months and I don’t regret reading it one bit.
Long live forbidden love.
