“Do you know how to live three hundred years?” she says. And when he asks how, she smiles. “The same way you live one. A second at a time.”
I’d heard so many amazing things about The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, yet I’d never read it. So when I spotted a special edition on the Zon, it jumped into my basket as if by magic ✨ The physical edition is gorgeous — sprayed edges, glossy illustrations inside — and the story is completely my kind of thing. I loved it ❤️ I could have happily carried on reading about all the years we missed in Addie’s past.
I chose to read this now because my cousin was reading it for her real-life book club, and I thought it would be lovely if we could chat about it too 📖 I’m not sure she liked it as much as I did, though!
The writing is beautiful, and the story is full of emotion and tragedy 💔 I found myself wondering how I would cope if no one remembered me and I were living forever — the places I could go, the things I could see, and of course, having the time to read every book I’ve ever wanted to read 📚✨
This book will stay with me for a long, long time and will be one I return to again and again 💫 I haven’t read anything else by this author before, but I’ll definitely be dipping into her back catalogue.
About the Book
When Addie La Rue makes a pact with the devil, she trades her soul for immortality. But there's always a price – the devil takes away her place in the world, cursing her to be forgotten by everyone.
Addie flees her tiny home town in 18th-Century France, beginning a journey that takes her across the world, learning to live a life where no one remembers her and everything she owns is lost and broken. Existing only as a muse for artists throughout history, she learns to fall in love anew every single day.
Her only companion on this journey is her dark devil with hypnotic green eyes, who visits her each year on the anniversary of their deal. Alone in the world, Addie has no choice but to confront him, to understand him, maybe to beat him.
Until one day, in a second hand bookshop in Manhattan, Addie meets someone who remembers her. Suddenly thrust back into a real, normal life, Addie realises she can’t escape her fate forever.
V. E .Schwab was born in California, raised in Tennessee, and currently splits her time between Denver, Colorado and Edinburgh, Scotland. She got her undergraduate degree in book design at Washington University in St. Louis, and her masters in depictions of monstrosity in medieval art at the University of Edinburgh. In addition to writing books and hosting a podcast called No Write Way, she spends her time on tour, or plagued by the knowledge of how short life is, in terms of the number of books she’ll be able to read, and obsessively saving tiktok videos for recipes she’ll probably never make. She also likes to run, and cycle, and swim—though not all at once.
V.E. is the author of more than 25 books, spanning MG, YA, and Adult, though she’s never been keen on labeling stories for a certain audience. Plenty of young readers like Vicious, and plenty of older ones like Cassidy Blake, and she believes the best story is the one that finds you when you need it.
Her greatest goal as an author is to make you doubt your reality. Not by convincing you that magic is real, but by planting a seed of doubt that it’s not.
