Book Club March 2022- The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
By: V.E. Schwab
Published Year: 2020
Publisher: Tor Books
Pages: 444
Summary (Provided by Goodreads): 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.
What I thought
This was my book club pick for the month. I had heard about this book from everyone. It has been all over Instagram and TikTok in addition to personal recommendations, so I decided to pick it. I only vaguely knew what it was about but everyone was raving about it and I wanted to see what all the hype was.
Addie is cursed. She made a deal for freedom, but what she didn’t realize was that freedom came with the price. Everyone she meets will forget her as soon as she is out of sight. Addie lives like this for 300 years, until she finally meets someone who remembers her.
This book might be a case of not living up to too much hype. I think it was a very interesting and well written story but I wasn’t in love with it. The story alternated between Addie’s past and 2014 and I frequently found myself reading to get to the present day chapters. When talking with book club, they felt the same way. It was definitely a slower paced book than I thought it was going to be and easily could’ve been edited by about 100 pages.
It’s not that I disliked the past chapters. I felt like it taught a lot about Addie and how she ended up where she did and why, but, as we discussed in book club, a lot of what was explained in the past was then explained again in the present so it felt repetitive and unnecessary. A lot like, I’m going to show you the rules but then I’m going to tell you the rules, and then I’m going to show you them again.
It also was interesting because it takes at least 100-200 pages until you meet the person who remembers Addie and that part of the story truly beings. I loved seeing that part play out, even though I was a bit nervous as to how it was going to end the whole time.
Speaking of the ending, the final quarter was easily my favorite part of the book. There were some insightful life perspectives that I found thought provoking and good for discussion. Unfortunately, because it was longer and due to some busyness, only one other book club member finished it this month, so we didn’t discuss much.
I would still recommend this book, but I wouldn’t name it one of my top books of 2022. I think if you haven’t heard a lot of hype around it, you might enjoy it more than I did. Just know it’s a little bit of a slower read. One that you will enjoy every time you pick it up, but also won’t feel like you need to immediately pick it back up after you’ve set it down.
