The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue Review

This book ruined me inside and I am going to need three business days to recover.

I was worried about The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue because it was so hyped, but it measured up. I did not see any of the plot points coming, apart from got mentioned on the inside cover. The writing is beautiful and flows effortlessly through multiple timelines. The story and the main character are both clever and insightful. Creating continual character development over a three-hundred-year lifetime is a feat, but Schwab makes it happen. This is the kind of book that made me love reading in the first place and I need more.

Addie’s battle of wits with the dark entity with whom she has struck a Faustian bargain is sharp and awe-inspiring. I wish I had such depth of vision. She starts out from a position of desperation, but she grows and polishes her approach, knowing that she literally has all the time in the world to get her strategy in place to win the long game. The darkness is used to winning everything eventually, but this time it might not. Seemingly, the central relationship of the book is between Addie and the mysterious man who has been the only person to remember her in three hundred years, but really it’s about Addie and the darkness.

I was in the middle of five separate books and absolutely promised myself I would not start any other books until I finished the ones I had in progress. Then I immediately read the first hundred pages of Addie. I’m not sorry. I finished the whole thing in three days, forsaking all other books and food. I am now in deep withdrawal from Schwab’s writing. I am still on the library waiting list for A Conjuring of Light at the library and also waiting for my delivery of Vicious, so I will continue suffering in dignified silence. Actually, it is more likely that I will suffer very loudly, complaining endlessly on Twitter.