The Invisible Life of Addie Larue

by V. E. Schwab

What young Adeline/Addie, living in the late 1600s in a small village in France, most wants is freedom.  When her family decides she should marry, she runs away and makes an agreement with a god (that answers after dark).  She gets freedom but it prevents her from being remembered by anyone, from leaving a mark anywhere.  (For example, when Addie rents a room for a week, the landlady evicts her the first night because she doesn’t remember Addie.)  And then, she meets a young man.  The story takes place across the span of 300 years.  There is some language (from a small-part character) and some sex (easily skipped).

Quotes

“Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.”    p. 35 ¶ 9

“...It is a lonely thing to be forgotten.  To remember when no one else does.”    p. 77  ¶3-4

“Palimpsest.  She doesn’t know the word just yet, but fifty years from now, in a Paris salon, she will hear if for the first time, the idea of the past blotted out, written over by the present....”    p. 78  ¶10-11

“Being forgotten, she thinks, is a bit like going mad.   You begin to wonder what is real, if you are real.  After all, how can a thing be real if it cannot be remembered?  If a person cannot leave a mark, do they exist?      p. 103  ¶5, 7

“Small places make for small lives.  And some people are fine with that.  They like knowing where to put their feet.  But if you only walk in other people’s steps, you cannot make your own way.  You cannot leave a mark.”     p. 179  ¶10

”’There’s this family photo,’ he says, ‘not the one in the hall, this other one, from back when I was six or seven.  That day was awful.   Muriel put gum in David’s book and I had a cold, and my parents were fighting right up until the flash went off.  And in the photo, we all look so . . . happy.  I remember seeing that picture and realizing that photographs weren’t real.  There’s no context, just the illusion that you’re showing a snapshot of a life, but life isn’t snapshots, it’s fluid.  So photos are like fictions.  I love that about them.  Everyone thinks photography is truth, but it’s just a very convincing lie.’”    p. 239  ¶7

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