Maryam Rz.'s Reviews > The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

When a book traps your soul from beginning to end and beyond, keeping hold of a string to your heart even as you leave it behind, you know it deserves all the constellations in the night sky.


Credit: Nicole

What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind?

They say if you look through a wooden ring on the 29th night of July, just after dark, you’d see a wraith wandering valleys and alleys—singing, sighing, seeking. And if you lean in, shell of an ear pressed to the ring, you would hear the echoes of a madwoman, murmuring of a dance of three centuries, a game between the ruler of darkness and a ghost of a girl, a war that was a love affair and a need and an obsession.

They say that, if you follow closely, she’d take you through continents and centuries—chasing shadows, stalking the vanishing footsteps of an idea, a touch, a constellation of seven freckles. And if you stack up your courage in a fist and ask her what it is she seeks, she would tell you it is a god and a girl, a forgotten thing. And then she would turn to the night and cry out in challenge and raging prayer.

This, my friend, is where I suggest you let your fist fly open, scattering the gathered grains, and flee. For if you don’t, you would glimpse a man with raven hair and a fleeting emerald labyrinth for eyes set in the face of a wolf step from the shadows, a dark god bearing his own temples of need and desperation. For if you stay, the devil would take your soul.

They say, and they say it honest and true.
I would know—I am the wraith, after all.

“No matter how desperate or dire, never pray to the gods that answer after dark.”

This quiet, languid, fleeting, wandering, aromantic romance that is more need and companionship than love; this tale of immortality with its heartwrenching wail and tragic tale of watching all you hold on to fall apart in your grasp; this book of a bewitching affair and search for freedom, love, and remembrance; this book with its ingenuous creativity, dwelling on the power of belief and ideas...stole my heart, bled it dry, and speared it atop the gates of hell to warn the unwary what would happen if you fell in love with the devil.

I persistently urge you to listen to the unbelievably flawless and fitting songs on my playlist of this book ➾ Spotify URL

“Nothing is all good or all bad,” she says. “Life is so much messier than that.”
And there in the dark, he asks if it was really worth it.
Were the instants of joy worth the stretches of sorrow?
Were the moments of beauty worth the years of pain?
And she turns her head, and looks at him, and says, “Always.”

In honour of Addie’s seven-star constellation of freckles, the feature that ensnared gazes and inspired artists and shone through centuries, I’m assigning each of the seven main stars of the Orion to the seven whys The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is a haunting, blinding, bold sky:

★ Rigel: Storytelling

I would like to announce that I am the biggest idiot on earth for depriving myself of the writing of such a master storyteller. Such exceptional weaving techniques of piecing the tale together as a puzzle; such eloquent work, bringing the pages and words full circle; such perfect prose with sensible, tangible, and fitting metaphors.

Such talent. Much perfection.

What she needs are stories.
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.
Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.

From sculpting characters that are more than a sculpture, real as any person with various outlooks on life that indeed leak into their way of speech, to scrutiny of details, wiping away any possible logical holes in the plot or magic, I am going to call V.E. Schwab my new all-time fave author even though this is my first book of hers. Let me just fold up my sleeves and get into the process of devouring the rest of her works.

★ Bellatrix: Addie LaRue, the Muse

Scarier than having a dream, a desire, a need, and making a huge mistake because of it, haunted by your blindness for 3 centuries, is watching it happen and thinking that could be me.

It’s the relief of understanding towards an unrestrained, wild thing in search of her freedom, her life, her own path—be it companionship or loneliness; it’s the warmth of kinship towards a defiant dreamer dreaming of a stranger with dark hair, crying out against the night to belong to no one but herself, be bound to none but herself; and it’s the resignation to a road undoubtedly ahead of a girl fleeing the smallness of a static life, a tomb, strings cut, head wandering.

It’s joy and it’s pain and it’s unforgettable.
Addie LaRue is unforgettable.

★ Betelgeuse: Love & Luc, the Devil

Before I talk of Luc and love, I will—in true self-centred-me fashion—talk about me. So buckle up for personal information you absolutely did not ask for.

# confession time

I’ve always believed myself a loveless creature. I’ve believed it and declared it, to friend, family, stranger. Strangers raise an eyebrow, family nods in understanding of a shared problem, but friends...friends always disagree, always start a speech about how kind and caring and helpful and generous I am, well-intendedly attempting to explain myself to me as if I don’t live in my head.

What those friends do not understand is the meaning of love. Frankly, I was not sure of it either other than knowing I am not capable of it. That is, until Schwab wrote:

“You are not capable of love because you cannot understand what it is to care for someone else more than yourself.”

Love comes with honesty and compassion and trust and understanding, yes, but, above all else, love is putting someone else before yourself. And I admit I cannot truly love because I know that, no matter how giving and caring and helpful I am, I will always choose me if choosing others hurts me, and the fact that I do not care for most things so I wouldn’t be hurt by them (like money) does not take away from my being an essentially selfish creature. I confess this without any sugar coating because I believe it’s crucial to know your most prominent flaws and be honest with yourself and those around you, to refrain from harming others through them.

That’s love. So what about Luc?

“Pain can be beautiful,” he says, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “It can transform. It can create.”

My uncalled for rant above makes it glaringly—blindingly, really, because if you didn’t get it then seriously whatareyoudoin—obvious I relate to this god of the dark between the stars; this selfish and lonely creature with secret longings and hidden loss; this cruel, moody immortal seeing the world as a game but also capable of being wounded and confused; this “vast and savage night, the darkness, full of promise, and violence, fear, and freedom” with a lack of respect for boundaries.

“Do not mistake this—any of it—for kindness, Adeline.” His eyes go bright with mischief. “I simply want to be the one who breaks you.”

But beyond being relatable, he is possessive, obsessive, abusive, and other unattractive -ives. And this plus Addie’s unwillingness to ever back down is what makes their bloodsport of a dynamic so utterly irresistible—one that, despite its toxicity (that is never overlooked or romanticised), has its perks (how he pushes her, challenges her, to be better, if ruthlessly) and hilarious moments (how he ruins her dates, even as he’s a god for god’s sake).

But remember that, no matter how these two cutthroats fit, no matter how their passionate, warlike back-and-forths are something they both crave, she only really had him in the vast emptiness of her world, and he made it so. Her thoughts are filled with him, because he made it so.

Remember that, however alluring their affair, it is not love.

★ Alnilam: Henry, the Storykeeper

You know that feeling when you get gifted a box of sweets and you think well okay this will probably be cloyingly sweet and ah, well, I will end up tired of it and then you have a taste and oh will you never forget the moment it sizzled on your tongue and you realised no no it is not more of the same and it’s simply unique?

That’s Henry for me.

Because sensitive, caring, soft, quiet, strong characters haunted by failure more often than not fail to hold my flickering attention, yet I now trust Victoria Schwab to do the unlikely. Because he is more than those adjectives strung up together; he is lost and hungry in a world that holds an insurmountable number of tastes, insatiably craving too many of them to choose; he is a boy who sees stories in theology, who fears being himself as much as he hates not being seen as himself; and he is more than simply sensitive, carrying a cracked heart that lets in everything and anything, and Schwab’s exploration of his mental health and anxiety was soulful and unforgettable.

★ Alnitak: Feminism

Sometimes I wonder if, through the millennia that humans have roamed the earth, there has ever been a girl who has not looked away, looked up, from what life had handed her, seen the lot of boy next to her and wanted more. I wonder if, even among the content and kind and incurious of generations ago where being a dreamer was not yet a seed planted, not a one of them dreamt of freedom and ownership of one’s own life.

And mostly, I wonder if the women who called after questioning girls as one would a sheep gone astray, are in reality the ones who’d seen the most injustice, dreamt the hardest, and learned such a hard lesson to end up helping in the keeping of the leash.

Freedom is a pair of trousers and a buttoned coat. A man’s tunic and a tricorne hat. If only she had known. The darkness claimed he’d given her freedom, but really, there is no such thing for a woman, not in a world where they are bound up inside their clothes, and sealed inside their homes, a world where only men are given leave to roam.

I might never know, but I will always seek tales of dreamers who would look at men and see at what little cost they moved through life, who would look into the woods and ask to be a tree, grown wild rather than pruned and cut down to burn in someone else’s hearth, be someone else’s chair.

Addie LaRue’s is one such tale.

★ Mintaka: History & Art

For a book that spans across hundreds of years and yards, it goes without saying that there will be history and humanity with all its wonders and cruelty and war and art. And yet, as Addie would put it, “history is a thing designed in retrospect” and Addie LaRue is less a lesson on history than a parable of a great many presents.

“Art is about ideas. And ideas are wilder than memories. They’re like weeds, always finding their way up.”

So while there is history with clever commentary on evolution of fashion and glimpses of war and death and revolution, that is not what it is about. Schwab’s new novel is about history taking shape. About stories and ideas taking root in unseen places and climbing up through the darkest places of mind that have never seen the sunlight. Not about the world-changing historical figures and world-ending historical events written as a hammer falling, but as a friend and a brief conversation and a flash of life. This is not about the affect of the grand but the power of the minor.

It’s about life and art and humans and how, even after one hundred years or three hundred years, there is yet more to find. Unknowns to see. Novelties to discover. And it is all the more memorable because of it.

★ Saiph: Loneliness & Remembrance

Have you ever watched that glorious, solitary tree of decades and centuries and memories struck down by a lightning storm? Ever held that tiny, inconsequential keepsake of a forgotten soul, refusing to ease your desperate grasp? Have you spent hours and days and a lifetime breathing your heart and soul and life into that lifeless thing, shaping it with your will and need and then, just a blink too soon, a moment before perfection, resolution, completion, seen it fall apart?

Tell me, have you ever felt that abyss of sadness reserved for the lost? The forgotten? The lonely?

“Why would anyone trade a lifetime of talent for a few years of glory?”
“Because happiness is brief, and history is lasting, and in the end,” he says, “everyone wants to be remembered.”

I am a creature doomed to loneliness, seeking its banishment and knowing it is here to stay, and this book is the song of my soul. Because this, this is the why behind the exquisite pain of this book: a loss so stark, so sharp it cut straight through me and I poured, I poured until I drowned and I poured until all was washed away and there, right there—beneath the pain and the dirt and the injustice—there lay the gem of names and marks fading into darkness; of identity and reality with its bittersweet embrace; of dreams and time slipping through your clutching hands; of me, and you, and humanity’s unending need to be remembered and chased and never replaced.

“The vexing thing about time,” he says, “is that it’s never enough. Perhaps a decade too short, perhaps a moment. But a life always ends too soon.”

Millions of thankful stars and constellations to my superhero for sending me an eARC from Edelweiss!

Info on the film adaptation with Schwab as screenwriter.