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.   

Misfortune

Misfortune

By Wesley Stace

On a moonlit night on the outskirts of London, Misfortune unfolds the tale of Rose, an infant boy adopted and raised as a girl, who must abandon the luxury and safety of his beloved home and travel halfway around the world to discover who he really is - and to unlock the secret of his rightful place.

I chose this for the "written by a musician" prompt, because I absolutely was not in the mood for any rock biographies and this one sounded entertaining, with a Dickens-influenced tale of mistaken identity.  Well.  Fools rush in, as they say.  It's not my style, but worse than that, I am two hundred pages in and there's been virtually no action, just scene-setting.  For a five hundred page book, that's practically criminal.  We spent probably fifty pages re-hashing the same event from three different perspectives, and frankly, none of it added anything to the story.  We could have easily done it in ten pages, and zipped along.  I found myself just getting bored.  For a story about a extremely wealthy cross-dressing boy stolen in infancy and his greedy relatives, it is just the dullest thing.  It needs more humor!  We had a brief flash of it when a visiting cousin was muzzled and walked like a dog, but that really feels like the only levity this whole time.  There's a weirdly brief and yet still-too-long scene wherein an older cousin molests Rose and climaxes/dies when he discovers Rose has a penis, and it's kind of played for laughs?  But mostly it was just awful and unpleasant.  

There is a lot of filler here.  I get that the author is going for the Dickensian feel, but Dickens was actually getting paid by the word, and he did it serial style, so things actually happened in each chapter.  We're getting thirty page chapters wherein the most exciting event is that they find an old book in a tree.  

And then we take a brief and bizarre turn into Turkey, and after having spent approximately a zillion words on the events of two days, we have absolutely no description of how Rose made it from England to Turkey, and then how she makes it back.  She's simply there and then she's back in England.  It's a necessary interval, since Stace spent basically the first half of the book stuffing her full of angst, and needed something to kick her out of it for the second half.  My solution would have been not to stuff her full of angst to begin with, and also, to make the first half a first tenth, but this is why I don't make the big bucks.  Or small bucks; I don't think there's much money in authorship.

The good news is the back half does zip by in comparison, although there's still enough time for two more gross sex/unconscious undressing scenes.  Since none of them are with family members though, I'm calling it a win.  

Stace does this multiple times, spending pages and pages on things we (sorry, I) do not care about at all, only to gloss over sections in which clearly some very interesting things happen!  Like when Rose gets married(?) and has a baby with Sarah before she turns 19?  I mean, what the hell happened there?  We're at the reckoning and then all of sudden Rose is holding up this baby ala The Lion King and presenting him as the next Lord Loveall.

And this whole things is solved in some sort of weird balladeer-panto way?  I'm sorry, but if we're referencing classic Dickensian fashion, there should be some long-lost documentation, which was almost destroyed multiple times, but not quite, which absolutely proves Rose's claim to the property.  None of this "eyewitness" bullshit.  None of this "Osmond felt bad for murdering three people twenty years ago, including a pregnant woman and confessed the whole thing".  

Now that I've finished the whole book, I can safely say that I just do not see the point of the Turkey detour.  We spend pages and pages on Rose's ramblings which (a) seem to be a mishmash of made up songs and personal experiences and (b) are never really explained. We're introduced to Franny, who never appears again; the whole thing is like a fever dream.  Clearly things happened to Rose on the journey out, as she alludes in vague terms to sexual favors, but we're left dangling over a pretty freaking important development in Rose's life, and one that sounds frankly traumatizing.  But it all washes away after her suicide attempt! Here's one where the journey isn't as important as the destination.

In the spirit of Dickens: Bah Humbug.

03: A Book Written By A Musician (Fiction or Nonfiction)

Fangirl

Fangirl

By Rainbow Rowell

Cath is a Simon Snow fan. Okay, the whole world is a Simon Snow fan, but for Cath, being a fan is her life-and she's really good at it. She and her twin sister, Wren, ensconced themselves in the Simon Snow series when they were just kids; it's what got them through their mother leaving.

Reading. Rereading. Hanging out in Simon Snow forums, writing Simon Snow fan fiction, dressing up like the characters for every movie premiere.

Cath's sister has mostly grown away from fandom, but Cath can't let go. She doesn't want to.
Now that they're going to college, Wren has told Cath she doesn't want to be roommates. Cath is on her own, completely outside of her comfort zone. She's got a surly roommate with a charming, always-around boyfriend, a fiction-writing professor who thinks fan fiction is the end of the civilized world, a handsome classmate who only wants to talk about words . . . And she can't stop worrying about her dad, who's loving and fragile and has never really been alone.

For Cath, the question is: Can she do this? Can she make it without Wren holding her hand? Is she ready to start living her own life? And does she even want to move on if it means leaving Simon Snow behind?

This was one of those that I wanted to like more - in fact, I did like well enough, until the second half of the book and I just kept feeling disappointed by the characters. It just felt like things kind of... petered out at the end.

We're introduced to "Cath" Cather, and her co-dependence on her twin sister, Wren from page one, as Cath moves into her college dorm.  I suppose the book could be about separating from your twin, growing up and staying friends, and managing your relationships, but it kind of just feels like Cath replaced Wren with co-dependent relationships with roommate Regan and especially with boyfriend, Levi.

[Sidebar: I really disliked Levi.  He was intrusive, demanding, and the age difference (and especially the maturity difference) between him and Cath gave the whole thing a much creepier vibe than I think the author intended.  It reminded me of Twilight: why would this older guy who appears to have his shit (mostly) together, be interested in this weird, asocial, mouse?  I just never got the sense that they were romantically compatible.  And also, it is fucking weird to start dating your older roommate's older ex-boyfriend while you literally live in the same room. It felt more like a relationship of opportunity than anything else.  "This guy is friendly to me and won't leave me alone, I guess I may as well date him."]

I spent some time in my last review hating on Cath, and I suppose I may as well continue here too.  I swear it was a total accident that I am reading two books with such related underlying themes (draggy girl who uses her fun twin sister as a crutch and has mommy issues tries to cope with her sister's emotional separation) although it's fun to spot the similarities and differences (different sisters wind up needing hospitalization! grandmothers have to fill in for absent mothers! fathers are helpless and hapless! you kinda root for the other sister!).

This may be my personal bias, but the Simon Snow excerpts sounded more interesting than the Fangirl story, and I'm clearly not the only one, since Rowell's gone on to write separate books just on the fanfiction.  It's obviously a Harry Potter take-off, but Harry Potter is one of the most successful stories ever, for good reason.  It's captivating!

Meanwhile, in Fangirl, it feels a little bit like Wren is meant to be the bad sister, just because she wants to get away from the human leech that is Cath.  I don't know if Rowell's intent was to suggest that both sisters are coping horribly with their mother's departure in different but equally terrible ways (Wren by drinking and partying, Cath by never leaving her room), but after a few weeks distance from the book, what it feels like is that Wren got punished for wanting to be more social, with a trip to the hospital for alcohol poisoning, and Cath was, well, kinda vindicated that she'd been right about Wren and her father all along. Which seems unfair, since Cath was just as messed up as any of them, and yet she's the only one who doesn't wind up in a hospital.  It just feels to me like Cath needed to do a lot of growing up herself, and I just didn't really see that she did. 

17: A Book Set On A College Or University Campus

The Piper's Son

The Piper's Son, by Melina Marchetta

Five years have passed since Saving Francesca, but now it's Thomas Mackee who needs saving. After his favourite uncle was blown to bits on his way to work in a foreign city, Tom watched his family implode. He quit school and turned his back on his music and everyone that mattered, including the girl he can't forget. Shooting for oblivion, he's hit rock bottom, forced to live with his single, pregnant aunt, work at the Union pub with his former friends, and reckon with his grieving, alcoholic father. Tom's in no shape to mend what's broken. But what if no one else is, either?

Look, y'all know how much I love Melina Marchetta, and if you don't, then, uh, I'm sorry that my statement, "Marchetta has always been one of my favorite authors," was too subtle for your peanut sized brain. Plus, Saving Francesca was always one of my top books, top. It's unlikely that I will ever be able to write about it because any kind of objectivity goes out the window when I talk about it, it would basically be me typing things like, "And then the eggs, and she makes friends, and Tolstoy and Trotsky, and Justine is her rock(!), and then she runs away but she calls home, and Luca, and then they get picked up at school!!!!!!!!!" and it's a big sloppy mess. Hearts in my eyes, hand to god.

So I was excited about The Piper's Son, because Frankie was always such a great character and I really wanted to know how she's doing for herself, five years on. The Piper's Son is tonally a fairly different book than Saving Francesca and Searching for Alibrandi, though, and even Jellicoe Road.

The Piper's Son alternates viewpoints from chapter to chapter between Tom Mackee, the, well, kinda doofus-y guy from Saving Francesca, and his aunt Georgie. I was going to refresh my memory about Tom (I always got him mixed up with Jimmy) but I can't find my copy of the book, which is very odd, since I brought Jellicoe Road and Finnikin of the Rock down with me, and I distinctly remember squirreling away Saving Francesca to take with me, so I am suspicious about its absence. I've also misplaced something else that I can't seem to find anywhere, so I'm wondering if there's some Bermuda Triangle box that I haven't unpacked all the way where all these wonderful items are hiding. Or if I'm just losing my mind and they're right out in plain sight.

Now that I'm completely sidetracked, let's talk The Piper's Son! But first, a short digression about Finnikin of the Rock. This book is messed up, man. It's well written, for sure, but it's sort of like if you were dropped into the world of Candyland, only instead of getting Gumdrop Pass and Queen Frostine, Lord Liquorice was a prisoner in the mines, Princess Lolly watched her brother murdered in front of her, Grandma Nutt had been gang-raped by soldiers, and Gloppy had died of the plague after being exiled from Molasses Swamp. It is a dark fantasy book, peeps. And I was completely unprepared for it. Marchetta usually likes to keep the major drama offscreen, so that her characters are dealing with the aftermath, more than the event itself. It's like the exact opposite of thrillers or murder mysteries, which generally move on to the next book in the series as if all these dead bodies are just another day at work, ho-hum. (Not that I'm complaining. I'm not reading Agatha Christie because I want to find out about trauma counseling.) Also, a fun fact: my brother dressed up like Lord Liquorice as a camp counselor once, probably because he enjoys making children cry.

In The Piper's Son, the great off-screen drama is the death of Tom's uncle Joe, who was blown up on his way to work in London. The death half a world away of the beloved younger half-brother of Tom's father Dom, and his aunt Georgie completely destroys the family, and Dom spirals down into an alcoholic mess that further fragments the family. Now, two years later, Tom's hit rock bottom and winds up moving in with Georgie because he's got literally nowhere else to go. Georgie has her own problems, as she's having a baby with her ex, whom she hasn't been on good terms with since he fathered a child while the two of them were on a break, seven years ago.

I enjoyed this book, although I didn't feel it had the humor that Saving Francesca had, which I'm still not sure was intentional or not. At one point in the book, Tom's grandmother and aunt are having a bit of fun at him about his thing with Tara Finke, and his grandmother goes, "Too sensitive, that one." Tom's way too sensitive about a lot of things, from his father's actions, to his need to work off the debt his skeevy ex-flatmates incurred at the pub, to his need for Tara. He needs to lighten up, Francis.

A common theme through Marchetta books is also the way the men and women always seem to have these life-or-death feelings toward each other. There's always at least one couple in which the man loves the woman to pieces really loudly, and it's just killing him inside. And the woman returns the love, but it's usually much less flailing and floppiness, and more determination and duh-ness going on for her part. That kind of unswerving loyalty is maybe the least-realistic of her books, as I've not met one couple who's expressed their feelings like that publicly (even if they feel it privately) the way that they do in Marchetta's books.

Of course, maybe the genius in Marchetta's books is the way that everyone seems to be able to say what they've been keeping in all this time, and they feel better for it, and everything works out in the end. It's like a billboard-sized advertisement for the truth shall set ye free, which I can get behind, although that happy ending is not how things usually work out in real life, sadly. I always employ a go-for-broke mentality when it comes to relationships, at least, and even though I've made quite a sight of myself, I still don't regret it, even though I'm not even on speaking terms with the people with whom I've been so honest any more.

Maybe I don't feel so strong a connection with The Piper's Son as I did with Saving Francesca because this one is more about grief and losing a sibling than about depression and feeling alone, which I have more experience with. I can't imagine what it would be like to lose my brother, and I don't want to. It still made me tear up some, though not the full-out sobfest that the others did. Marchetta is a master at the hopeful outcome, the we're-going-to-have-a-fairytale-ending-because-we'll-work-our-butts-off-to-get-it-because-we-know-the-alternative-is-terrible ending.

Georgie was not a very compelling character to me. Perhaps because of the structure of the book, with the alternating chapters, Georgie and Tom just had very different concerns (although the same grief about Joe) and it was harder to get Georgie's thoughts fleshed out. Tom was easier - I'd read him before, and he lives everything in technicolor, while Georgie is washed out in immobilizing grief, anger, and indecision. I think Georgie's issues could have been a book all their own, but because they were sort of side-alonged to Tom's, they got somewhat short shrift and wound up being an afterthought. It would have been better, maybe, to do it all from Tom's perspective, but give more scenes of him and Georgie together talking to get a sense of her problems.

I can't even tell how much of this review is about The Piper's Son, and how much is about Marchetta in general. Any book of Marchetta's is worth reading, but The Piper's Son isn't in the same class as Saving Francesca and Jellicoe Road, in my opinion, more like a Searching for Alibrandi-type, which at least isn't horrifically scarring like Finnikin of the Rock. I think I went through PTSD with that book, hand to god. It's nice to see Frankie again, although one of my most-beloved things about Saving Francesca was the deep deep friendship between the girls and Tom and Jimmy, which is missing here, mostly because half of them have moved away. I will never get tired of reading about these people though, and I'm half hopeful about the way that Marchetta leaves Jimmy out of The Piper's Son, like maybe she'll write a book about his problems, and how friends and family overcome it all, although at this point, I'm not sure what new trauma she can send him through, maybe amputation or paralyzation, and don't even think about doing that to Jimmy, Marchetta, haven't I cried enough already?!

I wanted to talk a bit about the title, which refers to Dom, Tom's father, the union man who is a natural born leader, who winds up going round the twist after Joe dies (and possibly a bit before) and leads everyone into a cave and seals them up while the rats feast on the leftovers. Wait, wrong fairytale. OR IS IT? It was a bit tricky to get a handle on the family dynamics, and I couldn't tell what to feel about the step-grandfather Bill. That could have used some more explication, I think. One thing to note though is that this too is a book about the third sibling dying and leaving the other two in pieces (a la Prince of Tides), except this is somewhat more grounded, and less over-the-top. Unfortunately, this is a terrible paragraph to end on, but I don't really want to move it somewhere else, and I've sort of run out of things to say about it.

I do want to point out that I am grading on a curve here, since I hold Marchetta to a different standard than I do, say, P.B. Ryan, whose Gilded Age mysteries are a nice treat on a Sunday night, but which do not inspire me to harangue my mother until she reads one of them, the way I forced her to read Jellicoe Road and then relished each one of her tears. Homework assignment: Am I a terrible daughter? Discuss amongst yourselves behind my back.