The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020) by V.E. Schwab seems to inspire either unwavering devotion or bitter hate in what I’ve seen online. It was also a nominee for a Goodreads Choice Award for Best Fantasy in 2020 and was a nominee for the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel.

Adeline/ Addie LaRue is a young girl in 1714, living in the French village where she was born, destined to be married but unwilling to fulfill the only role that is open to her. So she runs away into the woods, not realizing it is getting dark, and calls upon a force that has the power to grant her wishes. She wishes to be free, not realizing that when you make a bargain with the devil, wording is very important. Now free, no one she knows remembers her, and she can’t even speak her own name.

Schwab takes us back and forth in time, from the near-present back to Addie’s survival right after her “deal,” and we realize that this is the same Addie, 300 years later, now living in New York, having figured out how to live, when every day the people you meet are meeting you for the first time. Except one day, she goes back to a bookstore, and the manager, Henry, says “I remember you.”

I did enjoy the story, and kept trying to get to the end to figure out exactly what happened, but I had to just keep reading. I can see some of the criticisms, but I still loved the journey. There was no anti-fat bias that I saw–no real mention of characters’ body size at all.

I did really like this quote that Schwab used a couple of times that seemed to be similar to some of Elizabeth Gilbert’s ideas about creativity she discusses in her book Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear and in her Ted talks.

. . . ideas are so much wilder than memories . . . they long and look for ways of taking root.

I don’t know if there’s any connection, but I loved how Gilbert’s description of ideas or inspiration needing to find a vessel to bring them forth into the world was embodied by Addie as a muse over time that could not herself be remembered–but her ideas were still present, visible, and real.