Do you ever find yourself browsing the Libby shelves late at night, debating which ones to put on hold, before deciding to heck with it and reserving them all? This series is for you. These books are books I picked up on a whim, maybe because I recognized the author or the cover looked cool or they’ve been on my TBR for literally a decade and I have no idea how they got there but I’m going to read them now.
Anyway.
I picked them up on an impulse, and couldn’t put them down. These reviews will be less formal and more an argument for you to pick up this dang book already. Let’s jump in.
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab
This book is an absolute mastery. There, I said it. I picked it up because I had read V.E. Schwab’s Shades of Magic series and I had no idea she had written more (spoiler, she’s written a lot more, I’ve just never seen it marketed at all).
It follows our MC, Addie, as she makes a deal with the devil: live forever, but functionally as a ghost. No one remembers her once their eyes leave her. She can’t hold onto possessions. She can’t die. But the question is: is she really living either?
This is the central question that guides the book. When all you have is your own self and memory, how to do convince yourself you’re living? If other’s can’t see you, are you alive?
The thing is, this wish of Addie’s came from a deeply familiar place: she was raised in 1700s France where a girl is worth nothing except a marriage prospect. Addie was not particularly brave or rebellious, making her a very realistic and relatable MC.
Her one rebellion is the moment she breaks. The moment she follows through on what is expected of her and recognizes the screaming inside her soul and she just can’t anymore (TBH I saw way too many similarities between her ten-second husband and men I encounter today on a daily basis).
I loved the beats in this book. The author pulls us back and forth through time at the perfect moments, giving us glimpses of context and embedding us in the past when needed.
The beginning is slow, but the length is absolutely necessary. The book spans four centuries and we as reader’s feel it right alongside Addie. So by the time you get to the last third, and we find someone that remembers Addie, even after she’s left, it feels both precious and precarious.
This is a book you read in the evening on the weekend, with a bowl of soup and some bread.
This is a book that will ask you to consider the complexity of what being a participant in society really means. What being a woman really means and what it should mean. And whether what Addie really received was freedom, or just a man’s idea of a woman’s freedom.
It’s rich, and deep. Full of prolepsis and flashback, romance and loneliness. Purpose and listlessness. And the ending? Honestly mildly unsettling, to both Addie and me.
It is far from straightforward. But that’s why I love it, and why I think you’ll love it too.
Blue Eye Books 
This is one of my favorites, too! We’re reading it for our community book club next month, and I’m really looking forward to the discussion.
Kate
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I hope they like it just as much as you and I do! I suggested it to my book club too, because there’s just so much there!
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I really need to get around to reading this!! It’s also been on my TBR forever; I read The Archived and the sequel over a decade ago, a much lesser known work of Schwab’s, but somehow never kept up with her releases.
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