Reviews - The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

89.4k reviews for:

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

V.E. Schwab

4.23 AVERAGE

mxwll95's review against another edition

4.75

adventurous dark emotional mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

yaryurena's review against another edition

3.75

emotional reflective tense slow-paced

bearsnake's review against another edition

4.75

emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

gayathri_reads's review against another edition

4.25

adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

ts_anders's review against another edition

4.0

adventurous medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Content Warnings

princessrobotiv's review against another edition

1.75

reflective sad slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

I think this is the definitive sign that V.E. Schwab's writing doesn't agree with me. I was lukewarm on the Shades of Magic trilogy, but this was straight up insufferable. Schwab took what ought to have been a fascinating concept and made it boring, trite, and thematically bankrupt.

Addie has to be one of the worst characters I've read in ages-not because she's morally reprehensible but because she's nothing. This is a character that, as a human prior to her curse, spouts off milquetoast feminist concepts like, "Women shouldn't have to marry men they don't want to marry," and, "Women should be able to go places they want to go." Sprinkle in a bit of derision for any other woman who married and had babies (babies, UGH), even when they're supposed to be her only friend, and you've got the tired old narrative that drove Addie to sell her soul to escape an arranged marriage.

While I obviously agree with the base principles here, that's all they are-BASE principles. There isn't so much as a fart cloud of more meaningful feminist commentary to be found in this work. The forced marriage is the catalyst Schwab imagined would render Addie most sympathetic to the reader. And to a certain extent, you are sympathetic to her . . . until you follow her for three hundred years and realize that she's the most incurious loser to have ever existed.

Schwab attempts to make Addie mysterious, profound, and alluring, but we as readers aren't ever shown that she's anything other than young and hot. Men (and women!!!!) see her and immediately want to fuck her. Why? Who knows. We certainly never witness her saying anything particularly charming, or funny, or intelligent. Despite living for hundreds of years, when we see her in New York, Addie is still slouching around the city, apartment hopping, drinking, and partying. She goes to a few art galleries and talks about how she loves art, but again, NOTHING in her inner or outer monologues indicate that she has special knowledge in this, or any other, subject area.

In fact, Addie's inner thoughts are mind-numbingly heteronormative despite the heavy-handed way Schwab reminds us that Addie is bisexual. Literally all this woman thinks about are people--usually men--she has slept with, or wants to sleep with, or wishes would remember her after she slept with them. Very rarely does she ever think about the desire for community, or friendship, or family. Her interests are very singularly focused on romantic love, including romantic love for the sexy man-shaped god of darkness who cursed her in the first place. And as with every other relationship Addie forms, her relationship with "Luc" is shallow and utterly without chemistry.

"Tell me about it," he says
"About what?"
"I don't know. Everything. Three hundred years is such a long time. You were there for wars and revolutions. You saw trains and cars and planes and televisions. You witnessed history as it was happening."
Addie frowns. "I guess so," she says, "but I don't know; history is something you look back on, not something you really feel at the time. In the moment, you're just . . . living."

Cool, cool, so we're in the head of a woman who responds like THIS when asked to share even one singular opinion about experiencing three hundred years of history. Nothing. NOTHING? No thoughts, head EMPTY? Girl, huh???

Addie's character is annoying enough, but the writing is worse. It is so, so repetitive and poorly edited. There are glaring mistakes, like Addie's first taste of Champagne-always capitalized btw- happening in one chapter only for us to get her second first taste of champagne just 30~ pages later. If the prose ever creeps towards profundity, Schwab is sure to sabotage the moment in the very next sentence by repeating the same sentence three times with three different metaphors all conveying the same idea. Addie, despite being 323 years old, and Henry, despite being 28/29 years old, are both referred to almost exclusively as "girl" and "boy." A twenty-nine year old man is not a boy, for fuck's sake.

Maybe if you're between the ages of 16 and 21, and you still believe that aging is the scariest most tragic thing that can happen to anybody, and mentions of casual sex and drug use is titillating and edgy rather than incredibly mundane, you can like this book. Hell, I might have liked this book at that age. But at thirty+, I'm too fucking old for this.