The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is a book that I believed would top my greatest books of all-time list. I expected to read a book about Adeline LaRue. Her life, her deal, and how she fell in love with the darkness itself. But instead what I got was a whole lot of crushing disappointment.

This book had such tremendous but ultimately wasted potential. Here we have a protagonist who has lived 300 years. Somehow in those 300 years she has managed to do absolutely nothing. No interesting adventures or conversations with some of histories greatest minds, nothing. All she apparently did was get drunk and break into people’s houses, and also have a bunch of unfulfilling romances with people cursed to forget her. She also has this storyline of becoming an artists muse to try and leave some kind of imprint as to not get erased from humanity, but its not explored enough to make it interesting. How she viewed Luc ( the darkness) also frustrated me to no end. Because Luc through her eyes is portrayed as the villain of the story and yet all his villainous acts are simply him doing his job. Because if you make a deal with the devil, and you sell your soul, and he comes to collect, YOU CAN’T TURN AROUND PAINT HIM AS THE BAD BECAUSE YOU WILLINGLY SOLD YOUR SOUL TO HIM. When you go to the grocery store and buy something, you don’t turn around and call the store owner evil for taking your money now do you. The only other villainous act you could possibly point out was his deal with Adeline. But even that is a stretch because sorry to say (not really) it was completely her fault because she had no idea what she wanted when she called on Luc and it makes no sense to me how you can try and call on some unknown probably dangerous being to fulfill a wish when you don’t even know what that wish is. Honestly, one of my biggest annoyances with this book is its Eurocentrism. Somehow, in 300 years Adeline never leaves Europe\America. Apparently when Adeline speaks of wanting to see the world Africa, Asia, and South America don’t exist. She doesn’t even go to Australia or Canada but honestly, that would have just made it worse.

The Characters

Adeline (Addie):
So let’s begin with our main character Adeline. For someone who’s been alive for 300 years she is surprisingly immature. You would think that in 300 years you would gain a lot of wisdom and knowledge on life and the nuances and complexities of love, the human experience and the universe itself. But apparently, Adeline LaRue spent 300 years just lounging around because she almost mockingly displays no understanding of the complexities of the world that reflects 300 years of living and has this painful to read mentality that the world is black and white. Genuinely few things piss me off more than this mentality, in real life and in books. Because life as we know it is not black and white, it’s full of technicolor and grey area. You would assume that someone who has bore witness to 300 years of life and new inventions and technology and tragedy and bearing witness to the fickleness of human emotion compared to the vastness of the future; you’d THINK that they would be most suited to grasp this concept. Apparently, disappointingly, Adeline could not. One of my biggest disappointments with the book was that Adeline seems to be stupid. She has been around for 300 years but has not learnt numerous skills, or studied to utmost genius any singular subject. If I had 300 years of a life where no one would ever remember me, I would throw myself into learning as much as I possibly could. From Neuroscience to Astrophysics to the violin and Piano. I would study anything and everything even moderately interesting to me. I would attend every lecture and conference held in which histories greatest minds talked about their craft. Yes I would be alone, but my mind would be rich. I expected Adeline to be a kindred spirit in this way. Suffice to say, I was sourly disappointed.

Luc:

Honestly, I fell in love with Luc, or more accurately, the idea of Luc. It’s genuinely depressing because the author did him a great disservice. We never got to really know anything about Luc. We never got to understand his motivations, we never got to see anything from his point of view, we never got to understand his internal dialogue, we never understood why he did what he did, we never get to understand how he looked the world and how he perceived the world, and most importantly, how he perceived Adeline. We don’t even get some history on him. Exactly what his is what his powers are, what he does, his peers, nothing. Even if the author wanted him to be the bad guy in the book, at least make him interesting. Give him a point of view let us understand his motivations or his lore, SOMETHING. But alas, Ms. Shwab gave us nothing, not a single crumb.

Henry:
Even when I still had hope the book would be everything I wanted to be, I still didn’t like Henry. He just didn’t really matter to me in the grand scheme of things, because my mentality at the time was that I’m reading a book where the main character has been alive for 300 years and the other main character is a being who has been alive for as long as the world has existed.
Therefore, I just didn’t see the need to invest in the character.
We never get to see Henry’s motivations and how he related to his friends and his family and to the world. His mental health struggles and anxiety, were things that were never really explained or dealt with. What exactly drove some of his mental health issues, is a question that is never asked or answered but should have been both asked and answered. I never really got attached to Henry because I didn’t understand his purpose in the story. His romance and love story with Adeline was unbelievable to me and I quite frankly didn’t buy it. And frankly, I wanted him and Adeline to be friends because she
had had love we had seen her with love. But never friendship. And honestly? I think that would have been beautiful.

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is a book that promised me my long awaited love story with the devil. And it did not deliver. And not only did the romance suck, the protagonist sucked. V. E. Shwab had the opportunity to create a masterpiece, to capture my heart and give us a romance like none we’ve read before. Give us a protagonist that with her immortality discovered the secrets of the universe and shared them with us. Sadly, she did the exact opposite. Great, great potential, very disappointing reality.