Book Review: "The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue" by V.E Schwab

V.E Schwab is an amazing writer of fantasy and a brilliant constructer of stories. Whilst I was in university, I would love treating myself to the odd book by V.E Schwab in order to escape my literary studies for a while and honestly, this is possibly the best book she has ever written. “The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue” is written with such incredible and detailed precision and attention to order that you feel like you are moving through a series of events that happens so seamlessly in your mind. It does not jolt from one to the other, it does not flash from 2014 all the way back to the 1700s. Instead, it presents you with two simultaneous stories running alternatively together and makes it very, very simple to understand why it moves like it does. Personally, I love this post-modern structure to writing (and if you have read some of my other book reviews then you will know what I am talking about when I say ‘love’). The novel is a masterpiece of the genre and I hope that you too, choose to pick this up.

It is about a young woman called Adeline LaRue who makes a a dangerous deal in order to live free and forever but in return, she is forgotten by everyone who ever cared about her, loved her or even knew her. She cannot utter her real name and so, uses aliases. In trying to understand why this is, we see her move through the 1700s and through the 2010s, between this realm of figuring out who she is now and figuring out what has actually happened to her. In this brilliant tale of fantasy, drama, romance and folkloric horror, we see a young small-town girl turn into a woman with pretty amazing capabilities. The story is absolutely mind-bending and once you are in, you know you’re going to be sitting there all day just trying to find out what Addie LaRue does next and who she wants to be today.

The book is written so beautifully that every profound or contemplative moment is captured like a polaroid in slow-motion. The author lingers on these moments of when Addie is looking in a mirror, or staring at a coffee cup, or even talking to someone who she knows will never really know the ‘real her’. A woman who deems to be forgotten by others has these thoughts racing through her head. Thoughts like ‘everyone wants to be remembered’ and how people are so easily forgotten. Thoughts about stories and books, fairytales by Grimm and the way in which she knows a little bit more about this strange situation of a meeting than the person sitting opposite her and engaging her in conversation. There are moments in which you just feel so bad for her, but then you are pulled back into the world she once knew and you must stop to think which is better.

In this brilliant cross between life and immortality, V.E Schwab retells the classic Faustian Pact as something more than just time and souls. It is also about the way in which people operate within death, how we remember people who have passed because they have passed and whether Addie LaRue can really be remembered at all if nobody knows who she is. An epic tale of age intertwined with romantic flaws, perceptions of the world beyond ours and fantasies so absurd that they will make you almost too involved with the character herself, we have to question whether we know Addie LaRue at all ourselves.