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A review by bartlebies
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab
3.0
3.5
There’s no denying Schwab is an excellent writer. Her writing is BEAUTIFUL and she can set a scene like no other. Her characters feel so real and fleshed out even when they have little page time. But this particular story suffered in its length. You don’t even meet the second main character until nearly halfway through the book! We spend far too much time in Addie’s past going over the same things (how awful the curse is, how she’s had to adapt to being forgotten) over and over again. One or two stories is plenty. We don’t need ten anecdotes that describe how shitty her life is. Once we got back to present day, things picked up, especially with the addition of Henry as a POV character. But even the modern scenes were drawn out and didn’t add to the flow of the story at all. This book could have easily been 100 pages shorter and not suffered for it. The problem comes from having a plot that is almost entirely internally character-driven. It’s a cool concept, but having an entire book be about internal struggles is hard for anyone to make exceptionally interesting the entire time. Dedicating so many pages to it on top of that was a bold move that didn’t pay off. I listened to this book at 1.25x speed and still felt like it was dragging. That said, the narrator was great! Love a good audiobook narrator. It also kept the story flowing. Pretty sure I would’ve DNF had I only picked up the print copy. I also found the very late reveal that she and the darkness were in a sexual relationship super weird and out of left field. I could see how it built to that point, but having it so late in the book was a strange choice, especially given how this book ends.
There’s no denying Schwab is an excellent writer. Her writing is BEAUTIFUL and she can set a scene like no other. Her characters feel so real and fleshed out even when they have little page time. But this particular story suffered in its length. You don’t even meet the second main character until nearly halfway through the book! We spend far too much time in Addie’s past going over the same things (how awful the curse is, how she’s had to adapt to being forgotten) over and over again. One or two stories is plenty. We don’t need ten anecdotes that describe how shitty her life is. Once we got back to present day, things picked up, especially with the addition of Henry as a POV character. But even the modern scenes were drawn out and didn’t add to the flow of the story at all. This book could have easily been 100 pages shorter and not suffered for it. The problem comes from having a plot that is almost entirely internally character-driven. It’s a cool concept, but having an entire book be about internal struggles is hard for anyone to make exceptionally interesting the entire time. Dedicating so many pages to it on top of that was a bold move that didn’t pay off. I listened to this book at 1.25x speed and still felt like it was dragging. That said, the narrator was great! Love a good audiobook narrator. It also kept the story flowing. Pretty sure I would’ve DNF had I only picked up the print copy. I also found the very late reveal that she and the darkness were in a sexual relationship super weird and out of left field. I could see how it built to that point, but having it so late in the book was a strange choice, especially given how this book ends.