Have you discovered The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab?
I’ve inhaled the novel twice, which obviously tells you how much I adored it. I rarely read things more than once since there’s so much out there to tackle on my TBR pile. I try to read 50 books a year; picking the same one twice isn’t the best way to get through my list.
What is Addie Larue About?
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue tells the story of a young woman in France in 1714 who makes a deal with the devil (or “the darkness” or “the night itself”). Like all deals of such a nature, Addie gets way more than she bargained for and we get to watch as she makes her way through the next 300 years without aging and without anyone being able to remember her the moment they leave the room. She gets to stay young and live until she’s tired of it (she can give up any time she’s ready to relinquish her soul), but nobody really knows her, except “the darkness.”
So why read it twice? I found the characters of Addie and Luc so intriguing (Henry less so) that I couldn’t pay as much attention to the beautiful language the first time through. I knew as I was reading that I wanted to stop and jot down lines, but I was racing to see what would happen next.
Here are some of my favorite lines, which won’t ruin it for new readers. These lines will just give people who already read Addie a bit of nostalgia.
“March is such a fickle month. It is the seam between winter and spring–though seam suggests an even hem, and March is more like a rough line of stitches sewn by an unsteady hand, swinging wildly between January gusts and June greens. You don’t know what you’ll find, until you step outside.” (20)
” The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle, unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a storm. If you insist on calling them, take heed: be careful what you ask for, be willing to pay the price.” (Estele, pg 30)
“All girls are prone to dreaming. She will grow out of it, her parents say–but instead, Adeline feels herself growing in, holding tighter to the stubborn hope of something more.” (33)
“‘I remember you.’ Three words, large enough to tip the world.” (135)
“‘ . . . ideas are so much wilder than memories, so much faster to take root.'” (Luc, 210)
“‘ . . . happiness is brief, and history is lasting, and in the end,’ he says, ‘everyone wants to be remembered.'” (351)
“Most fights, after all, are not the work of an instant. They build over days or weeks, each side gathering their kindling, stoking their flames.” (412)
“After all, life seems very long sometimes, but he knows it will go so fast, and he doesn’t want to miss a moment.” (438)
“Addie has said so many hellos, but that was the first and only time she got to say good-bye. That kiss, like a piece of long-awaited punctuation. Not the em dash of an interrupted line, or the ellipsis of a quiet escape, but a period, a closed parenthesis, an end.” (440)
“A story is an idea, wild as a weed, springing up wherever it is planted.” (440)
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