Book Review: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
By Elizabeth Prata
SYNOPSIS
I express disappointment in contemporary books, mentioning my struggle to find engaging stories. I specifically critique a novel about Adeline Larue, who makes a Faustian bargain, resulting in a dull, unmemorable existence. I find the writing pretentious and the character unlikable, thus choosing to stop reading, continuing my search for better literature.
The untrod frontier of a new book is exciting. You’ve gotten the book from the store, or it arrived from Amazon, or the Library called to tell you your loan is in. You get home and eagerly open the book you’ve waited for, settle with your favorite beverage, and start reading.
The writing isn’t up to snuff…or you don’t connect with the characters… or the story falls flat…whatever it is, you’re disappointed. You stick with it for many pages, hoping against hope the pace will pick up, the writing gets better…
Sadly closing the book shut, you think about the glory days of your life when you read great book after great book. The stories seemed never to stop. Your purse/bookbag/briefcase was always heavy with the next book you took out at the bus stop, the cafeteria, lunchtime, because you couldn’t wait to see what happened next.
I haven’t had much luck lately.
These days, novel after novel falls flat for me. More than ever I’m writing ‘Did not finish’ in my calendar or on Goodreads. Is it me? Have I become an impatient/jaded/grumpy old woman?
Is it my sanctification? Has my faith advanced to the point where I am overly picky about secular novels? Or just not interested in them? But I love a good story! I just can’t find them so easily anymore.
I loved The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters. I do recommend that one. I loved The unselected journals of Emma M. Lion. Vol. 1 and recommend that too. I am eagerly awaiting vol. 2 inter-library loan from the library, and it’s taking ages to get here.
So while I wait, I ordered from the library the book everyone is talking about:
SPOILERS AHEAD
The premise is, in the 1600s a young girl named Adeline Larue lived in a small village in France with her woodworking father and her homemaking mother. Her Catholic parents brought her to church, but Addie was bored of that and turned to a witchy/shaman/priestess weird old lady in the village who taught Addie about “the old gods.”
Growing up, Addie disliked all the normal things girls like to do, and instead dreamed of the wide, wide world. She disdained motherhood and rejected suitor after suitor. Finally at age 23, old maid territory, her parents forced her into an arranged marriage.
On her wedding day, she fled to the river where she usually prayed to the old gods and throw in a trinket as sacrifice as part of her ritual. This time, an ‘old god’ who called himself ‘a devil’, (who might be THE Devil) appeared. Later we learn his name is Luc (short for Lucifer??) and makes a Faustian bargain with her, her soul for her ‘freedom’. Addie wanted to be unencumbered, live freely, and have more time. The devil (AKA The Dark) grants her wish in exchange for her soul, but as her shaman-priestess had warned, ‘be careful what you wish for’. The devil gave Addie immortality but her wish to be free and unencumbered meant that the minute she was out of sight from anyone she knew, they would immediately forget her, including her parents and the shaman lady. Addie had become invisible, unable to say her own name, make a mark on the world, or contribute to it.
My review
The premise: I like time travel and time-bending novels. I suppose it’s to be expected that a modern novel with a young woman main character will have her reject home and motherhood, claiming that marriage is a yoke that limits her ‘freedom’. Thanks to women’s lib, were used to that. I got over that disappointment, only to encounter her dealings with ‘the old gods’ or the demons who inhabit the pagan river and forest. I was uncomfortable as a Christian with the devil and Addie’s evolving ‘relationship’, which is a central point in the story.
I put that aside for the time being and plowed on with the story, intrigued by wanting to see how the author would present the mechanics of Addie’s new, nearly-invisible life. She had no papers. If she paid in cash, always stolen, the innkeeper would forget that she paid and require more payment. She had to sneak around every night to find a place to sleep, and that usually meant sleeping WITH someone she met in a bar or restaurant- man or woman. Ick. Who, of course, would not remember her in the morning.
The mechanics turned out to be boring. The author had Addie walk around a LOT. From one side of the city to another. The writing was, as one reviewer said, both pretentious and childish. I became perplexed by the constant strained metaphors (“She was stubborn as stale bread”). The choppy sentences which I believe the author thought brought gravitas to the page.
And it is a problem when you just don’t like the main character. For 400 pages Addie was self-involved, self-pitying, had no interests, and was just plain old boring. She was promiscuous with both sexes. She was 400 pages of ‘not-there’ flatness, bemoaning the very life she had said she’d wanted and had ignored the warnings from the shaman lady in her 1600s village.
So the uninspiring character, the stilted, pretentious writing, the lack of good editing, the demon guy Addie eventually physically hooks up with (incubus anyone?) I quit reading. I was just too uncomfortable with it all. I love a good sci-fi book, an absorbing time travel or time-bending book, but this one was not it.
The search for a good old fashioned yarn continues. By the way, V.E. Schwab describes her upcoming new book as a ‘Messy, Villainous’ Queer Vampire Story’. Yeah, I will skip that one, thanks.
