The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

By V. E. Schwab

 

France, 1714: in a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever―and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets.

Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world.

But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore and he remembers her name.

I am not entirely sure what I expected but I am pretty sure it is not what I got.  And I should know better, I actually have read some of Schwab's previous books, but this was both better and less sweet than I expected, and perhaps also more fleeting. I dunno, I spent a lot of the first half of the book just kinda going along with things, and then as soon as we got Henry's backstory, I was immediately anti-Henry.  Bitch, Addie just sweated through three hundred years of theft and homelessness and you out there complaining because one of the hundred available opportunities to you just didn't seem right? And cause you got broke up with you're going to jump off a building? So in the sense that Addie does not end up with Henry, I liked it!  Two thumbs up!

I didn't really like Luc either though, so I wasn't entirely pleased she was hanging with him either, plus, I know we get glimpses here and there, but they basically spent twenty or thirty years together and it's swept by in about five pages? After spending a hundred pages on sad-sack Henry? Is that because if we spent more time on Addie and Luc's relationship we wouldn't even consider Henry a viable option, or that we would be mad that she's planning on exiting her relationship with Luc with a bang? {although I have to say, she calls herself cleverer than Luc, but she honestly thought that Luc making a deal with Henry and her finding Henry was a "mistake"? That doesn't bode well for her future strategizing}

I mean, it was a little bait-and-switchy, but since I wasn't ever really attached to Henry, I didn't mind the ending.  Addie herself, honestly, I was a little let down by what she ended up doing with her life - maybe there's more we don't know about, but for someone who can't be injured and will live forever, it took her a hundred years just to leave the country? And then it was by force, so I don't even know if that counts.  Where else is she going? I mean, no wonder she's depressed, she's basically been like one of those old people living in an apartment and never going outside for the last twenty years of their life.  Also, and this is just me, but if I made that deal and couldn't tell people my real name, I would immediately pick a different one that I would just use.  People change their names all the time.  Am I attached to mine? Yes.  If I couldn't tell it to anyone, would I consider going by a new one? Absolutely!  

I just - for all that she seems like she's got a routine and everything down by the 2014 sections and is in a groove, like, what is she doing? She lacks purpose.  So she's a "muse" (and I appreciate that we kind of elide over however inspiring she can be if they forget her as soon as they leave the room) but she's so taken up with this idea about leaving a mark of some kind that she seems to have spent no time considering whether her mark would be worthwhile.  I dunno, maybe I just don't understand artists. 

Stylistically, nothing really bothered me.  The chapters were brief enough that it never felt like it dragged - except for Henry's POV sections - although I think a lot of repetition could have been excised without losing anything. Another reviewer called it "hollow" and I guess I kind of agree with that. It's a good story but not one that gripped me or that I'll be returning to.   

Stormswift

Stormswift

By Madeleine Brent

The year is 1897. Deep in the mountain wilderness of the Hindu Kush, a seventeen year-old English girl is brought to the primitive tribal kingdom of Shul to be sold as a slave. Her ordeal endures for two long years before at last there comes the chance of escape to Lalla, as she is called, who believes herself to be Jemimah Lawley, heiress to the great house and estates of Witchwood in the county of Surrey. On the hazardous journey of escape across Afghanistan with a man who hates her, she hears for the first time a name that will later echo menacingly in her life... the name Stormswift. Once home, she faces the shock of being compelled to doubt her own identity. Is she truly Jemimah Lawley, or is she suffering from a delusion caused by her degrading ordeal as Lalla of Shul? Soon she is plunged into a new world, where she finds there are others who, like herself, are perhaps not what they seem to be. Life in England brings her strange adventures and a touching friendship, but also the heartbreak of love without hope. In these pages Madeleine Brent has woven a tale of many surprises as mystery after mystery unfolds, but strangest of all is the mystery which causes Lalla of Shul to return to the barbaric land of her captivity, there to encounter the dark shadows of death and disaster before she at last finds the happiness she believed could never be hers.

So I've written about Brent before, and I maintain that as far as rip-rollicking adventure stories with fun heroines, they are delightful.  For example, in Stormswift, we encounter Jemimah Lawley, aka "Lalla" aka "Mim" first as a captured slave in 1881 Kafiristan, what is now known as Nuristan, a province in Northeastern Afghanistan.  In short order she assists her fellow Greek slave with a birth, gets sold to a mad prince, and escapes with a peddler, Kassim, who surprise, surprise, is more than what he seems.  Specifically, an English spy who promptly gets shot up by his Russian counterpart.  After removing the bullet from Kassim and burying the dead Russian, Jemimah manages to get both their butts back to the embassy in Herat (and by the way, tracking down her route in this first part of the book was pretty fun.  So much traveling through parts of the world I rarely engage with!).

P.S. I know the description says 1897, I don't know where they came up with that - Jemimah's parents were massacred at Bala Hissar in 1879, and she was held for two years before escaping, clearly putting her the timeline of the book in the early 1880s.  

Then, she's shipped back to England, where she discovers that an imposter has taken her place after her two-year kidnapping sojourn, so she joins a Punch and Judy traveling show run by this "hilarious" guy and his Romany girlfriend.  Except then the Romany girlfriend's ex-boyfriend tracks them down and beats up Punch and Jemimah, and offers to marry his ex-girlfriend, so she leaves with him.  And we're only like, barely halfway into this and haven't even been introduced to like, the main villain!

So it turns out Punch is actually a lord, and has a nice house with a relatively nice mom, who puts them both up until Jemimah is framed for the theft of a ~mysteriously important~ locket so she goes to live with Anne/Melanie, who turns out to be married to KASSIM, who turns out to be BEST FRIENDS with PUNCH, who turns out to be in LOVE with ANNE, who turns out to be a BITCH.

AND THEN, Jemimah realizes that the guy in the locket is her old friend the Greek slave, and Anne is murdered, and they all set off for Afghanistan.

So I remembered why I wasn't as big a fan of this one, and it is for two reasons: one is that Jemimah decides she loves Lord Punch, who, let's be honest here, is a real doofus.  I mean, you have mysterious, sexy Kassim, who rescued her from Afghanistan and refuses to sleep with his awful wife, and then on the other hand, you have goofy ass "Henry", who is fucking some rando when they first meet, and hates having to be rich, so he keeps running off, but makes sure to keep his hand securely in the trust fund pocket, so he doesn't actually have to face any consequences of being poor, or actually having to, you know, "work" for a living.  But Henry is "funny" so she just decides he's the one for her even though his big life plan at the end of the book is to run off and bum around on a Mississippi Steamboat, like Mark Twain.  By the way, did you know that Mark Twain had a younger brother who he convinced to work on steamboats with him, and his brother died at age 20 when the boiler exploded and Mark Twain always felt himself responsible?  Now you do.

I mean, I know Kassim keeps getting himself shot, and that's not really the mark of a super successful spy, but seriously, I think Brent had to kill him just to prevent all his readers being like, "Hey!" Obviously Kassim is the superior choice here.  I mean, Henry is just the worst.  His only redeeming quality is that he's like, 100% on board with Jemimah actually being Jemimah (and not a fraud pretending to be Jemimah) although he had a leg up on everyone else because Kassim vouched for her to begin with.

And second, like Anne/Melanie is supposed to be this extraordinary Harpy-like person, but she's frankly just kind of a bad person.  She has affairs, she blackmails her lovers, a couple of them threaten to commit suicide, she employs a burglar.  It's all pretty tame.   For real, when I was re-reading this, I was like, "Oh, yeah, her Sanctuary, that's where she has those drug binges and orgies." But it's not!  It's just like, regular adultery, no drugs whatsoever.  And just one dude at a time.  Too much build-up, she falls really short by comparison. 

That all said, if you want a genuinely fun, fast-paced story about a young woman who overcomes massacres, rape, slavery, snipers, boat rides, false accusations, doofy young men, impersonators, gypsies, two-faced women, and the awful burden of having money, Stormswift is the book for you!

Ten Second Reviews

Fleishman is in Trouble

By Taffy Brodesser-Akner

A satiric novel about a disintegrating marriage was probably not the best choice for a post-nuptial read.  I appreciate the wit and social commentary, but the general and specific unpleasantness of the marriage and the people in it were Too Much.  I didn't find it enjoyable, more like a duty.  After getting through husband Toby's two hundred plus pages of narcissism, sex, and whining, I really wanted to read Rachel's POV, but was disappointed to find it was only like sixty pages long, and consisted mostly of her accepting shitty behavior from everyone around her until she eventually has a full on mental breakdown.  Uplifting? No. I felt like this book ends with the equivalent of a winking-face emoji, as our erstwhile semi-narrator Libby decides she'll write about the end of a marriage, but leave it on a cliffhanger, because...? I'm not actually invested in whether these characters manage to get together at all, they clearly have fault lines going all the way down.  I just, sort of like, wanted bad things to happen to Toby and just wanted Rachel to stop giving a shit, and well, there's an audience for everything, I suppose, but not me for this.

The Egg and I

By Betty MacDonald

As all the reviews make clear, for a pretty racist semi-autobiographical version of a young wife living out on a chicken ranch in the upper Northwest, this is a real entertaining book. There's definitely some things I bet MacDonald's family regrets her putting in print now (like, for example, that she thinks taking the land away from the American Indians was a good thing because they're just lazy good for nothing drunks) but when she focuses on herself and the day to day indignities of life, like neighbors visiting at 7 the one day she's still in her pyjamas, or how her tropical plants are dying while her husband's very practical garden is blooming, she's wonderfully funny and wry.  She's aslo amusing when talking about her neighbors, including Mrs. Kettle, who lives in basically a pigsty, but keeps one room locked up and pristine for visitors.  MacDonald may have a sharp pen, but she isn't shy about her own failures and shortcoming, so it doesn't come off that mean spirited - except for all the really racist bits.   I really enjoyed this although I have to say that this is one book that censorship would likely improve my experience. 

Cassandra at the Wedding

Cassandra at the Wedding

By Dorothy Baker

Cassandra Edwards is a graduate student at Berkeley: gay, brilliant, nerve-racked, miserable. At the beginning of this novel, she drives back to her family ranch in the foothills of the Sierras to attend the wedding of her identical twin, Judith, to a nice young doctor from Connecticut. Cassandra, however, is hell-bent on sabotaging the wedding.

This was not at all what I would have picked out for this prompt (although I suppose wedding planning books don't really "include" weddings, just every other goddamn detail about them) but it was an easy enough read.  I was initially surprised to see it had originally been published back in 1962, since everyone's attitude seemed so modern, but it did devolve into that breezy, California-dreamin' sixties-period Didion flavor.  I feel fully qualified to speak on it, since I read one whole chapter of Play It As It Lays.

I don't think the blurb is exactly right either, since Cassandra is more bent on sabotaging her own life than the wedding.  Not to spoil anything but she takes a bunch of pills when she finds out her sister Judith won't let Cassandra break up with Judith's fiance (on Judith's behalf, this isn't that modern). I'm catching up on reviews, so I've already read Fangirl and I've been going on about co-dependency there too (I only just realized both books involve co-dependent twin sisters, although Judith is considerably more stable than Wren, and Cassandra considerably less so than Cath) but talk about co-dependency!  You try to commit suicide because your sister plans to get married?! Whoa!  So I guess, yes, that is the ultimate sabotage, but in the end (more spoilers!) once Cassandra wakes up again, she seems more or less like a new person: pleasant, accommodating, and not at all displeased to be a bridesmaid (even though Judith's already married, and do you think that's ever going to come up again: "Oh right, when you were committing your very dramatic tantrum, we just up and got married because we thought you might cause a scene. How right we were!").

This is much more of a character study than a plot-heavy book - people are heavily described, and most of the action takes place around the pool.  So for all that it was published almost 60 years ago, it does feel relatively fresh since there's not much that would be different nowadays, except that they would have used a cell phone to call the therapist.  And apparently, weird twin sister relationships are still causing drama even now, so it's very prescient.  I (more spoilers, but only for my thoughts, not anything really important) didn't really like Cath in Fangirl - I feel like she just replaced one co-dependent relationship with another, and while Cassandra clearly has more trouble managing herself, I wasn't as frustrated with her, maybe because while, yes, as melodramatic and "extra" as her suicide attempt was, she seems less helpless.  I mean, she did plan out her potential death (and I'm not sure if we're supposed to be reading into it this way, but I always figured she wasn't planning to die based on her calculating the pills to take) but by golly, at least she had a plan.  Cath seems content to simply wait for things to happen to her - and occasionally bewail the happening.

Anyway, Cassandra is a nice little trip through the California countryside for a June weekend.  It's a good length - any longer and I think you'd start disliking the characters again. Anyway, aside from the abrupt right turn at the end wherein everyone seems to be capable of living happily ever after, even though nothing to that point would indicate that as a possibility, it was still a nice palate cleanser.  A sort of lemony-sharp cocktail.

34: A Book That Includes A Wedding

Prince of Tides

Prince of Tides, by Pat Conroy

Lila Wingo - the beautiful, proud matriarch. Abused by her husband, she is the sweet and steely woman with social aspirations so great she is willing to sell her kids down the river to achieve them.

Henry Wingo - the cruel partriarch. Shrimper, schemer and loser, he is a man who will beat his sons to teach them not to cry. Now, perhaps too late, he strives to make peace with his own family.

Luke - the older son, a Vietnam veteran, a strong man of burning convictions who races towards a shocking fate while trying to save an entire town.

Savannah - the famous, gifted, and troubled poet. The cadenced beauty of her art and the cries of her illness are clues to the secret she holds in her heart. She has locked away the too-long hidden story of her wounded family. Now, to avoid destruction, it must be fully revealed.

Tom - Savannah's twin brother, the narrator. He is an unemployed football coach and English teacher with a loving wife who loves someone else. With his troubled sister and a perceptive psychiatrist, he is forced to look backward to unravel a history of violence, abandonment, commitment and love - and to find an answer for them all....

Woooo, doggy. This one was a doozy. I hope y'all like your Southern Gothic with a whole lotta shrimp, melodrama, and TIGERS, because that's what's on the menu tonight, folks. Now, strictly speaking, I'm not sure TPOT is Southern Gothic, since I get all my information from Wikipedia, and Wikipedia doesn't list TPOT on their Southern Gothic list. However, Wikipedia does describe Southern Gothic as:

[A] subgenre of gothic fiction unique to American literature that takes place exclusively in the American South. It resembles its parent genre in that it relies on supernatural, ironic, or unusual events to guide the plot. . . One of the most notable features of the Southern Gothic is "the grotesque" - this includes situations, places, or stock characters that often possess some cringe-inducing qualities, typically racial bigotry and egotistical self-righteousness - but enough good traits that readers find themselves interested nevertheless.

So let's see: set in the South? Check. Ironic or unusual events? Check check. The grotesque? Uh, yeah, check. The novel begins with events already piling up in quick succession: Tom, our narrator, learns in short order that his sister has been hospitalized for trying to commit suicide (again) and his wife is cheating on him, in part because of the emotional distance between them after his brother Luke's death and Tom's resultant nervous breakdown. Phew. Have you got all that? Good, because it doesn't slow down. The story is set up as Tom is relating his family history through flashbacks to his sister's psychiatrist, who is attempting to discover why Savannah is trying to die. The basic format is Tom, present day, telling the shrink of childhood events, which are related to us in episodic flashbacks. A great SECRET lies at the heart of the novel, but the flashbacks continue after that, up to the day of his brother Luke's death, which sets up the present day retelling.

TPOT is a rollicking good read. It's chock-a-block full of fine melodrama, aching sadness and depression, and long-buried secrets of the type you drive you insane. The pace doesn't let up - the foreshadowing in the first half of the book is enough to drive you to get to the big reveal, after which it's all downhill. And I mean that. The giant SECRET which is the apex of the novel is also oddly glossed over. If you read the flashbacks both before and after that, you would be hard pressed to say that anything had happened in between. The fallout, emotionally, is not discussed, in contrast to the fallout from Luke's death, which is what drives the New York scenes.

Conroy seems to think that the ending, with the final revelation of Luke's death, will be sufficient to explain the events of the present day (i.e., Savannah's wrist-cutting, Tom's breakdown, and the confession of all to Savannah's psychiatrist). Unfortunately, I didn't find that to be the case at all. If anything, I was left cold by Luke's demise, which is a feat, since I had been so fond of him in the flashbacks. Maybe it was the straw that broke the camel's back, but the close unbreakable bond between siblings in the flashbacks seemed to have cooled by the time Luke's one-man stand rolled around, leaving me to question just why Tom and Savannah both went so kablooey over it. That's maybe the biggest weakness of the book. The SECRET in the middle is completely unforgettable, and knits a tight bond between the family, while in comparison, Luke's one man vigilantism just seems to show how disparate and scattered the family has become. The siblings have gone on to separate lives, the mother has remarried (not a spoiler unless you are worse at picking up hints than I am). Maybe it's meant to be an illustration of how close the brothers and sister are no matter time or distance, but it just did not work for me.

In fact, the whole New York thing was complete filler for me. Part of my problem is that the people in the present day, and to some extent those flashbacks occurring towards the end of the narrative, all talk like cretins. Look, people don't talk like that in real life. I can't describe how crazy it made me to read exchanges like this between Tom and Susan, the psychiatrist:

"You make jokes about your sister's psychosis. What an odd man you are!"
"It's the southern way, Doctor."

and

"I must admit, Tom, that it irritates me every time you don your mantle of cultural yahoo intimidated by the big city. You're too smart a man to play that role very effectively."

"I'm sorry, Lowenstein," I said. "No one finds my role of New York debunker and cultural redneck more tiring than I do myself. I just wish it wasn't a cliche to hate New York, that it was a startling new doctrine originated by Tom Wingo."

I can't convey how ridiculous these exchanges sound to me (maybe they're perfectly normal and I'm the only one who found them to be as if aliens were trying to mimic actual human conversation) but let me attempt to describe it thusly: You know Life of Pi (just, bear with me)? And how in the end, people were arguing about whether or not the creatures in the boat were people or animals or just figments of Pi's imagination? It's like every character in Tom's adult life is a figment of his imagination, another aspect of him reflected in a mirror. That's why they all sound so similar. Similar and weird, because Tom is weird. And also because he's basically talking to himself.

Anyway.

The book is a glorious read, though, and Conroy has an artist's touch with the English language. And a very liberal hand with metaphor and simile. The flashbacks are ripe with description, overflowing with images:

[The undertaker] was tall and thin and had a complexion like goat cheese left on the table too long. The funeral parlor smelled like dead flowers and unanswered prayers. When he wished us a good day, his voice was reptilian and unctuous and you knew he was only truly comfortable in the presence of the dead. He looked as if he had died two or three times himself in order to better appreciate the subtleties of his vocation.

How great is that?! So it baffles me that when they made the movie, they focused more on the present New York stuff than the flashback scenes (or so I've heard through the imdb grapevine), because the flashbacks are what make this book, man. They are awesome. Every chapter has new tragedies, each presents a new evil set against the family. Every event brings us closer to doooooooooom. Or, okay, maybe not, but it sure feels like it! TPOT builds wonderfully to its violent climax, like a train wreck you can see in the making.

TPOT has too many faults to be a great piece of literature, but it's definitely worth reading, and you will probably never forget it as long as you live. The lyrical tone of the writing balances nicely the grim events of the Wingo family. Although a more ridiculous final line, I have never read. I am not even going to spoil it, no matter how much I want to, and no matter that even if I did spoil it, it wouldn't matter because it doesn't make any more sense out of context than in! (okay, maybe a little more sense, but not much).

P.S. Poll time! Greatest improbability in the The Prince of Tides: the events of the SECRET, or the fact that Savannah got her version published as a children's book?

I mean, really.