This book is cruel and beautiful, with equal doses of both. It felt like Schwab was playing as many games with the reader as the Darkness was playing with Addie. It was so frustrating getting to a really good point and then the timeline swaps back to two hundred years ago, or whenever, and you have to suffer through a chapter from that time before finding out what happens – only to get swept up in that time and not want to go back. But perhaps in hindsight I should’ve known that Schwab simply doesn’t have it in her to write simple fiction – there’s always something epic and scheming lurking in the wings and I just LOVED this. This is twisty and turny in a way you don’t really expect. We follow her over three hundred years as she defies the Darkness and tries to make a life for herself, with the main plot (which is on the blurb, no spoilers, don’t worry) being that she finds a boy who remembers. After making a deal with the so-called devil, she is cursed to this life of being forgotten.

And it was those very last lines that pulled me over into the five-star camp.Īddie LaRue is a beautiful, tragic and frustrating story about a girl who cannot be remembered. And I confess, for most of the book (at the very back of my mind) I was going, but what is it that has people in such a tizzy.

This has to be one of the most hyped books at the moment and I was terrified going into it that it would simply blow over in a puff of overhyped wind and let me down.

The invisible life of addie larue stars