The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

This is an extremely well-written, engaging, gorgeous story of a clever, enterprising, curious young woman taking the long road to outsmart The Dark. Normally, books start getting interesting about 100 pages in. This one had me in it’s thrall almost immediately. It's an excellent novel.

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Adeline still prays to the new God, when she must, but when her parents are not looking she prays to the old ones, too. She can do both: keep one tucked in her cheek like a cherry pit while she whispers to the other.

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The premise is that in the early 1700s in a village in France, Adeline LaRue sells her soul to the devil in order to get out of an arranged marriage. The deal is that she becomes entirely forgettable by everyone and when she’s done with her life, the Darkness gets her soul.

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It will take Addie years to learn the language of those eyes. To know that amusement renders them the shade of summer ivy, while annoyance lightens them to sour apple, and pleasure, pleasure darkens them to the almost-black of the woods at night, only the edges still discernible as green. Tonight, they are the slippery color of weeds caught in the current of a stream.

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What the Darkness doesn’t realize is that Addie is resourceful and very emotionally intelligent. She quickly understands what she needs to do to not just survive but thrive. She lives centuries longer than the Dark expects her too, withstanding wars, freezing to death (even though she can’t die), hunger, arrests, and intense loneliness.

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March is such a fickle month. It is the seam between winter and spring—though seam suggests an even hem, and March is more like a rough line of stitches sewn by an unsteady hand, swinging wildly between January gusts and June greens. You don’t know what you’ll find, until you step outside.

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Addie can be seen but not remembered, so if the person she’s with turns their back on her, when they turn back to Addie they don’t recall who she is and why she is in their bed (for example). Only a very strong-willed person could figure out how to eat, clothe themselves, find places to sleep and ways to get around.

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Food is one of the best things about being alive. Not just food. Good food. There is a chasm between sustenance and satisfaction, and while she spent the better part of three hundred years eating to stave off the pangs of hunger, she has spent the last fifty delighting in the discovery of flavor. So much of life becomes routine, but food is like music, like art, replete with the promise of something new.

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After 300 years of living alone, with occasional visits from the Dark, Addie finds a human man who doesn’t forget who she is. There are love stories in this but I wouldn’t classify it as a book about a love story. It’s more about a fiercely independent woman who refuses to let a man, any man, even a god, define her and her life.

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The characters are fabulously drawn, the story stays interesting, and the ending is satisfying without being obvious. I loved this. 100% recommended.

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