Rating - ⭐⭐1/2
"A Life No One Will Remember. A Story You Will Never Forget.
France, 1714: in a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets.
Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world.
But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore and he remembers her name."
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is a standalone fantasy novel by V.E. Schwab.
I kind of wish I could forget this story like how everyone forgets Addie...because I didn't really like this.
I wanted this to be good, I really did, but it just wasn't. This book was rough for me straight from the beginning. The set-up that puts the rest of the story in motion didn't work for me. The set-up is supposed to make you care for Addie and everything she goes through throughout her life, but when you have no sympathy for her it makes it really hard to care for her. After all, it is her fault that what happened to her happened.
Another thing I didn't like was the romance (and the lack of the romance I was actually expecting). I did not care about Addie and Henry one bit. I thought that their romance was less like fate and more coincidently convenient due to what is revealed later on in the book. I thought that this was going to be about Addie and Luc, but I was apparently wrong about that.
Then we get to the ending of the book. I thought the main message of the book was going to be about inevitability and confronting your mistakes, which I rather liked a message. That was not the direction Schwab went in though and I didn't really like the direction it did go in. The ending is also left kind of open which is frustrating when this is a standalone.
The only thing I liked about the book was Luc. Addie makes him out to be this horrible guy and kept playing herself as the victim, but he was just doing his job really. If you didn't like the cards you were dealt, then you shouldn't have made the deal and just run away or give in like he kept asking you to do. I thought we would get more Luc because I kept seeing the book being reviewed as a romance between Addie and him, but nope, didn't even get that which was disappointing.
Overall, this book tried to hit a home run with the pretty cover and the interesting synopsis, but instead, I got a foul ball.
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