The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

This was one of those books that... yeah, it took me a full month to read, not because it was long, but because there were entire parts of the book that dragged so much that I found other things to do outside of reading this.

There is a lot of this book to like and I'm glad I read it, that being said, there are some major pacing issues in here.

The basic idea here is Addie LaRue doesn't want to do her arranged marriage, nobody is listening to her, so she makes a wish in the night and a malevolent spirit hears her wish and grants it to her, in exchange for her soul. What did her wish end up being? “I want to live.”

Thus, Addie lives for hundreds of years but nobody can remember her. The author takes every opportunity to place Addie in different parts of history, which is where things get bogged down. A subplot is that Addie figured out the only ‘mark' she could make on the world, the only recordings of her, were art. So she meets tons of artists of note and becomes a subject for them.

There's parts of this book where you can't help but roll your eyes at historical figures that show up, all having a made a deal with this same spirit. All the famous people have, you see. Okay.

The actual meat of the plot comes into play when we meet Henry, a boy who works at a bookstore in NY and gasp–he can remember Addie~!

It's at this point where we get dueling POVs between Henry and Addie and we're pretty deep into the book here. Like, really far into it. We're talking almost halfway before the actual plot of the book kicks in. Seriously, almost half of the book is just doing constant legwork of “nobody remembers Addie and she's depressed, also the demon/spirit/devil is an asshole.”

So, when we eventually, finally find out dear Henry has made a deal with this same devil, which is why he can remember Addie, we find out he just wanted to be loved. Oh, and his deal was just for a year, so Henry dies soon.

But guess what? Addie and Luc (the spirit, who now has a name) go from an adversarial relationship to oh wait, they are actually ~in love~ sort of. Sort of. You see, Luc is a bad boy, bad to the bone! He is a demon and is ~the night~ who makes these deals but he's way into Addie and the timelines start to feel jumbled. This hot-and-cold relationship gets shown in flashbacks, but the problem is some of the flashbacks happen before periods we've already flashed back to and had no real reference to this Addie and Luc romance plot.

So here, with the book almost coming to a close, we have dear Henry, who's going to die, and dear Addie, who's decided she's not human anymore, anyway, and we have Luc, who just wants Addie for himself and this relationship doesn't feel very healthy... For a book that meanders and lingers, the third act does a lot of the heavy lifting. My difficulty with the book at this point is imagining this thing have massive rewrites and revisions to make this plot more focused and that's generally speaking not where I want to be with a book.

The ideas and characters mostly work, but the plot's lack of focus leading to cramming most of it into the last act means by the time it's done you're satisfied and have fond memories of it, but reflecting on the whole book it's not as easy to keep these feelings.