emma's Reviews > The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

CALLING ALL DEMONS.

Attention: all ghouls, witches, wizards, sorcerers and -esses, devils, creatures of the night, and other harbingers of vaguely this-seems-like-a-bad-idea type magic…

Let’s make a deal.

According to this book, you’re making bargains with any bozo who sputters her way into seventeenth-century French bodies of water, and I want in on the opportunity.

Yes, you read that correctly. Our protagonist, Addie LaRue, is a complete bozo.

For those of you who have been living under a rock that no overhyped bestseller can permeate, 1) drop that address and 2) I’ll give you a lil synopsis, so you can continue your very wise decision to avoid this book but for my review (high praise, really).

We begin with the most boring story ever told: A girl in seventeenth-century France who is bored. Her name is Addie. She has freckles that look like stars, for some reason, but you do not have to remember that because she and every other person she meets will never shut the ever-living f*ck up about it.

Speaking of ever-living f*cks, Addie considers herself better than all those other girls who are also expected to marry and live normally, so she makes a deal with a devil-type guy that she’s allowed to live forever. In exchange, no one remembers who she is.

Tough luck? I guess? I don’t know, I got sick of Addie complaining within about 4 months. And we have 300-some-odd years to go. So sorry your immortality isn’t exactly what you pictured. Boo-hoo.

The whole thing reminds me of how I watched Marie Antoinette with a friend recently and spent the entire duration of it unable to believe I was expected to sympathize with MARIE ANTOINETTE. Sure, she had to get married to someone she didn’t want to marry...along with EVERY WOMAN ALIVE. Is it my fault she lived a life of incredible privilege and didn’t spend it very well? No, it’s not. And I won’t allow Sofia Coppola to punish me for it.

Relatedly, no one could have lived from the early 1700s to present and done a worse job of it than Addie LaRue.

She travels only within Europe until World War II (and really mostly in France at that), then moves to America and really sees nothing more than LA, NYC, and NOLA. (Love an initialism.) She manages to meet no people of color. She never considers slavery, revolution, women’s suffrage, or civil rights. She doesn’t travel to a single majority-POC area. She learns several languages, all of them Western.

She is the most irritating stupid idiot alive. I want to throttle her.

On top of that, this book has very little going for it other than pretty writing. (I’ll hand it to you, Schwab - your style went from doing nothing for me to almost distracting me from what a dumpster fire everything else was from time to time.)

I didn’t like Addie for a second, but I tried to like everyone else. Henry, for example, seemed like he could be My Type, as a skinny guy who works in a bookstore - but he felt like anyone. Henry’s two (2) friends, who represent the entirety of the, well, representation in this book, seemed fine, but we never got to confirm or deny that because (as you may have already guessed from the inkling of diversity) they are almost never present.

This just felt half-baked and silly. There was no plot to speak of until maybe the last 100 pages, and the ending was ultimately so disappointing and ridiculous that I almost wish the plotlessness had stuck around.

Just a note, to any, ahem, authors who might find it helpful: If characters are boring and unremarkable, and the story feels flat, and the romance never hits, then going for a big emotional ending isn’t going to do much for anybody.

Anyway. Yeah, I hated this.

Bottom line: Dropping from a 3 to a 2 to 1.5. (The writing was nice.)

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pre-review

took me long enough.

review to come / 3 stars (actually 2)

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currently-reading updates

at the rate i am reading this, i will finish it just in time for my 2021 wrap up

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tbr review

no, i have never enjoyed a VE Schwab book.

yes, i desperately want to read this one.

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