“A dreamer,” scorns her mother.

“A dreamer,” mourns her father.

“A dreamer,” warns Estele.

Still, it does not seem such a bad word.”

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab

I’m enjoying books that takes the thought experiments that you turn around in your head when you can’t sleep and renders them magnificent at the moment. Like Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library exploring a world in which you could erase past regrets, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab explores some of those most human of what ifs, what if you could live a life without responsibility? What if you could life as long as you wanted? What if you could be truly loved? What would you give to make these dreams come true? And what else would you be giving without realising?

In 1700s France, Addie LaRue is about to be forced into a life she doesn’t want, pushed into marriage with a widower to become a replacement mother to his three young children, she runs from the church and makes a Faustian pact with a man who might be the darkness, might be the devil, but agrees to give her an unlimited amount of time in exchange for her soul when she doesn’t want it anymore.

But pacts with old god, devils and the darkness are rarely as straightforward as the human making the deal might hope, and Addie soon realises that she’s traded her soul for a curse. She has unlimited time, but no one remembers her, and no one can remember her. She’s forced to walk the world alone, never able to settle or find security, with the darkness stalking at her heels waiting for her to yield. For nearly three hundred years she’s totally almost totally alone, lovers forgetting who she is when they wake in the morning, or a door closes between them until one day, a man in a book shop, with a secret of his own, remembers her.

I’m going to put it out there now that I wish that Addie LaRue was as forgettable as in the book – because then I could read it again for the first time. I don’t often re-read books but with this one I’m tempted. I love the concept, the characters, the writing, the dialogue… I haven’t read any of V.E. Schwab’s other books but after reading The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, I’m tempted. It will be my go to birthday present for so many people this year who I think would love it to.

Spoilers for the Invisible Life of Addie LaRue below…

Does Luc love Addie? Does Addie love Luc? Does Addie love Henry? Does anyone love anyone?

Ah sympathy for the devil. I know, I know, Luc is a complete bastard in many ways but I do feel sorry for him gradually falling for Addie, trying to hold back on the tormenting her, telling her he loves her only to have it thrown back in his face. Given that he’s the devil, the darkness, one of the malevolent old gods, it can’t come as a surprise that he’d want to twist the knife with a Henry shaped trap.

I’ve seen reviews which didn’t buy the Henry/Addie love story but I completely did. Because there are so many different types of love and I think that Addie’s love for Henry is much more about herself than him. It’s less a selfless love, than a need he fulfils. There’s obviously the physical attraction – at first she thinks he’s Luc who has based his own appearance on Addie’s ideal man, and joked about how many of her lovers look like him, she has a type, but also there’s the other needs that he fulfils. He’s the first person who can remember her in three hundred years, he can say her name, he can write her story and she goes for men and women who can leave a mark for her, and this one isn’t allusions in a song, freckles in a painting but her story explicitly spelled out on paper. He also reminds her so much of herself before she was cursed, the fear of time running out, of never being able to do enough, that speaks to her. She relishes his company, the experienced of being remembered, of building a story together…. But I would argue that in the story V.E. Schwab has written, it doesn’t really matter if Addie LaRue loves Henry Strauss, she certainly isn’t sure, even before she realises the full nature of his curse, whether she loves him. She wants to, but she doesn’t wholly believe that she does.

“And then he whispers three words into her hair. “I love you,” he says, and Addie wonders if this is love, this gentle thing. If it is meant to be this soft, this kind. The difference between heat, and warmth. Passion, and contentment. “I love you too,” she says. She wants it to be true.”

To some extent, Addie realises that her love for Henry is like Luc’s love for Addie – they are in love with the only person who knows them. She as much as acknowledges this to herself as she and Henry drive away for the time away by themselves as he runs out of time and Henry asks her if she would have made the same deal again, when she weights up what she’s gained and what she’s lost “She fell in love with the darkness many times, fell in love with a human once.”

So for me, how sincerely we believe in Addie and Henry’s love, the type of love, the depth of it is irrelevant, because to all intents and purposes, the whole relationship is another part of the twisted game that Addie and Luc are playing with each other, with shades of Cathy and Heathcliff, how much can you hurt the person you know you really love? Luc has deliberately set Henry’s curse in motion for him to stumble into the path of Addie, remember her, and for their relationship to grow with the full intention of his big reveal to Addie that surprise, I was always behind it in the dark, twisting the knife, looking for a new way to break you. But for centuries, Addie has revelled in the game of finding the cracks in the curse, of beating Luc at his own game, leaving her mark despite him, to spite him. Henry’s just another extension of this and becomes her trump card in the game she’s been playing against Luc. By apparently submitting to Luc, to free Henry from his curse, she’s setting an example of how she wants Luc to love her by taking her soul out of the deal, and because he believes that she’s chosen him and he’s won he agrees. But by doing this, this allows Henry to survive long enough to publish her story, her name everywhere. A strike against Luc that he doesn’t seem to even be angry about. But then we realise that all of this served a bigger purpose, not only is Addie’s soul now off the table, but the revised deal has provided her with the prospect of the freedom that she’s always truly craved – the terms are now that she will stay by his side as long as he wants her there, and she’s willing to play the twisted love game long term, because never underestimate the hold of a toxic relationship when both parties are determined to win.

“Perhaps it will take twenty years. Perhaps it will take a hundred. But he is not capable of love, and she will prove it. She will ruin him. Ruin his idea of them. She will break his heart, and he will come to hate her once again. She will drive him mad, drive him away. And then, he will cast her off. And she will finally be free.”

So yes, sympathy for the devil, poor Luc has no idea of the hell Addie has in store for him.