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Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Genre: Sci-Fi / Fantasy, 5 stars
Reasons to love it: Relatable characters that hit too close to home, LGBTQ, a rich tapestry of a story, darkness, love.
Gah…. send help.
I don’t trust my own rating skills right now. Is 4.5 stars even right? Can we just imagine there’s no rating there? It’s a Schwab book. One of my idols. The master of storytelling. The master of craft. The person I want to be best friends with someday… if the book gods ever smile down on me. Or if I just go and make a deal with the devil in the dark.
But here’s the real truth… I love and hate this book in equal measures.
Like I said, send help.
And here I sit, trying to pull together my thoughts so that I can give a somewhat legible review without spoiling the plot. Hard task. I will brave it for all of you kind souls. Or we could just go off my seesaw rating and call it a day.
No…. well okay then.
Here we go.
The ending is a kicker. In the same measure that it was sad and also nicer than I was expecting, it also made me extremely angry. To have achieved the conclusion that we did, certain characters needed to be more developed. Instead, I felt that I had to piece together the conclusion myself just so that I could go along for the ride. Now, I will pull off a magic trick and flip what I said on its head. Schwab is a masterful craft of characters and Oh My God, Henry stole the show. I don’t have words for how seen I finally felt in a character. Schwab nailed it on the head in a really depressing, is this who I am, kind of way.
Do you see the problem that I’m having here? Am I making my predicament clear enough?
The biggest kicker in The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue was the writing style. It was the most beautiful and lyrical writing at the beginning. I melted in the descriptions. Words choices, rhythm, everything about it screamed Addie Larue. As if she was really telling the story. But then it became tedious. It became too short. Too lacking in description and immersion. The chapters became shorter so that the scenes, the vital moments needed to fully develop a key character, fell short. By the time that it was over, the story felt too literary fiction for my taste. Which might not be a problem for you. It’s most definitely the quickest road to snooze fest for me. I need rich imagery and emotions to enjoy a book, and most literary fiction stories tend to lack that immersion.
Again, completely split down the middle.
And as much as I’m truly in love with what Schwab wrote, I can’t seem to ignore these flaws. Maybe it’s because the story didn’t end the way that I wanted it too. Not in a “it ended so badly and I wanted a happy ending”, but that I wanted it to be way darker. The setup was there. The payoff wasn’t in my taste.
At some point I got tired of the flash backs. I got tired of Addie’s story. I got tired of hearing the good days in the present. The mystery that drew me in at the beginning was gone and with it, my interest. This sounds opposite of what Schwab warned about. She said it was a slow start. I felt the book was the opposite.
But then we have my flip… where I say that the story was so thought provoking and raw, especially the moments where Addie has to learn how to survive. How human she still was. How beautiful her marks were.
So what do you think I should rate this book? Do I go fully on technical, or do I cling to the feeling in my heart cut by the very story of Addie LaRue. Her desire to never be forgotten and to really live. Maybe I’ll just leave that rating and let the story sit with me a little longer.
Love Kait
Happy Reading
Reading Challenge: 147/175