Addie has said so many hellos, but that was the first and only time she got to say good-bye. That kiss, like a piece of long-awaited punctuation. Not the em dash of an interrupted line, or the ellipsis of a quiet escape, but a period, a closed parenthesis, an end.
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
This book has been sitting in my to-be-read pile for a while now. It became a sort of “break glass in case I don’t what else to read” book and I’ve been putting it off for other books from authors I haven’t read. I have read 4 other books from V.E. Schwab, Vicious and the three books in the Shades of Magic trilogy, all of which I enjoyed so I strongly suspected I was going to enjoy this one as well.
That suspicion was entirely correct. I enjoyed this book a great deal, more so than the other books by Schwab that I’ve read. I think my strong attraction to this book comes from its rather poetic prose. The author uses a lot of good turns of phrase, great metaphors and descriptions of events and settings that left me breathless.
This book also kept surprising me at every turn, I was never quite sure what a character would do next or how a particular event would play out and the book maintained this sense of mystery till the very end. The ending of this book is really really quite well done and made me want a sequel to this standalone title.
One of the most fun aspects of this book for me is that it defies genre categorization, nominally its a historical fantasy but its also got a bit of romance and a bit of magical realism, adventure and thriller in it. It doesn’t feel like this book is ever particularly stuck with genre tropes for any one genre and instead dabbles in many as is necessary to tell a good story.
I think V.E. Schwab is one of the best fantasy authors writing right now and I hope to read more of her work in the future. For anyone who is looking for a place to start with her work, you definitely cannot go wrong with this book.