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Secret life of addie larue1/17/2024 Once it’s finally revealed why Henry remembers Addie when no one else does, the reason makes sense Schwab is an author who understands the importance of both subverting and satisfying reader expectations.In the vein of The Time Traveler’s Wife and Life After Life, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is New York Times bestselling author V. You can relax into your enjoyment of the story and trust that she knows what she’s doing, because she does. Yet in Schwab’s talented, inventive hands, there turns out to be a third way. Girl falls in love with the only boy who seems to understand her the obstacles between them must be, by the end, either overcome or acknowledged as insurmountable. In lesser hands the story might become predictable. Henry and Addie aren’t equal partners, exactly, but they’re partners in a meaningful, resonant way. Once he appears, chapters from his point of view alternate with Addie’s, but as the title indicates, this is not really his story, but hers. Henry is warm-hearted and kind, prone to depression, and just as drawn to Addie as she is to him. Then, in 2014 New York City, she meets a young man named Henry in a bookstore, and he remembers her. Luc returns at irregular intervals to torment her, but she resists the urge to give up and surrender her soul even when times grow desperate. The fact that no one remembers her makes it easier to steal, to slip away, to live on the fringes, though it also makes any kind of lasting connection or stability impossible. The world’s impact on her and her impact on the world are both evanescent. The dark, entrancing figure who negotiates the bargain-taking the good-looking, masculine form of one of Adeline’s own drawings, and later, given the name Luc by Addie herself-blesses and curses her with a kind of immortality: she will live as she wants, freely, until she tires of life, only no one she meets will remember her.įor hundreds of years she lives under these conditions, finding her limits, testing them. Born in a small French village in 1691, Adeline LaRue makes a bargain with “the gods that answer after dark” to escape an unwanted marriage. It just tells a gorgeous, immersive story, gripping the reader with a tale of disappointment and triumph, damage and healing, fear and wonder, and above all, memory.Īt its core, the plot engine of Schwab’s book is unmistakably Faustian. A typically lush but not intrusive bit of description: “The garden, once overgrown, has been swallowed up by the encroaching woods, and the wild has won its war against the hut, dragged it down, saplings jutting up among the bones.” It doesn’t privilege emotion over plot, or interior complexity over exterior action. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue doesn’t just traffic in beautiful sentences, though it has those a-plenty. How lucky we are that, instead, Schwab decided to write this one. But those books have already been written. Schwab could write a 784-page coming-of-age doorstop about a young man whose in-the-moment decision to steal a valuable painting shapes the rest of his life, or an epic yet intimate exploration of the intertwined dysfunctions of a troubled Midwestern clan, or a novel of irrepressible grief and longing narrated by more than 150 voices, most of them dead. I have no doubt that if she wanted to, V. Schwab’s new book The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue isn’t just an amazing book for its genre it’s an amazing book, full stop. Yet certain genres are still elevated and others dismissed the New York Times “By the Book” feature still regularly asks writers “Which genres do you avoid?”īut there is no particular art to literary fiction that doesn’t exist in fiction of other genres, and V. A sincerely curious, skilled, and committed writer can basically write whatever she wants, genre be damned. I’m tempted to say the modern idea of genre is a joke, except that it’s not funny.
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