Addie LaRue, the principal character in V.E. Schwab's The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (#958), is three hundred years old in the New York City of the last decade. Funny, it felt like it took me that long to read this book! Groundhog Day kept flashing across my mind as the plot crawled and repeated, crawled and repeated... I know it's on the NYT's Best Sellers List, but it only reminded me why I have such a low tolerance for books in vogue.
It's listed under Science Fiction, but I would argue with that. Girl in early eighteenth century France (Addie) doesn't want to get married and live and die her whole life in the tiny village of Villon. So what does she do? She sells her soul to The Dark. He's not exactly the devil, but it is your typical Faustian bargain; in return for Addie's soul when she's ready to surrender it, she gains immortality. She feels everything, but can't leave a trace - as soon as she's out of sight, she's literally out of mind. She becomes functionally invisible. It takes three hundred years before she meets someone who finally remembers her. Care to guess why? It only takes five hundred plus pages of large print type to find out why. I kept slogging, but I'm not sure the final payoff was worth the time spent. Sorry I wasted my time on this one.
No comments:
Post a Comment