I was quite excited to read this book after hearing about it from an ‘upcoming recommended books’ list back in the autumn. I ended up ordering a physical copy of it in January, yet only just now managed to finally read it… the day I actually read a book the same day I get it is probably never going to happen. I have some mixed feelings about this book. It provides an interesting premise—a Faustian deal, a woman who can’t be remembered, immortality—all things I’m a huge fan of in literature; yet, it also contains some lackluster characters and a dull narrative. On one hand, it was fast-paced enough to distract me from my term papers (this is entirely my fault, though). On the other hand… it was also difficult to continue reading the book after the first 100 or so pages. Other reviewers have mentioned that the middle of this book was slow going, and I would agree. The final 100 pages get a bit more interesting, but the ending we get is not necessarily one that completely satisfies.
One of my main issues with this book are the characters. At its core, this novel is a character study of Addie LaRue—what motivates her, how she deals with her situation, and her growth in a 323+ years life. Unfortunately, a lot of this book is just Addie ruminating on her poor decision-making and her efforts at being stubborn just to spite the ‘devil’ she makes a deal with. For all her talk of wanting to live a real life and explore, we as the reader hardly get to see any of it. It takes her until WWII (more than 200 years after she makes the deal) to even leave the continent of Europe—and where does she go? The US, of course, land of the free! This book made it blatantly obvious it was written by an American, which was very jarring when you consider that Addie is supposed to be French. For some reason NYC is the best location for Addie to be (not to mention certain other characters, particularly of the immortal variety); this seemed nonsensical. You could’ve replaced Addie LaRue with Jane McAmerican and countryside France with countryside Maine, and this story wouldn’t have been that different. She learns several languages, but all of them are European. I got the sense that Schwab tried to make the characters seem ‘progressive’ by making both of the main characters bisexual, but in the end, this story is still a heteronormative romance. Several times, Schwab demonstrates how Addie being a woman is detrimental to her trying to exist in ordinary life, but she does nothing to challenge these misogynistic stereotypes. Addie becomes yet another victim to be saved by her ‘prince’ (in this case, the devil).
When it comes to the romance—an element of this book that really felt overplayed—there was little buildup, and little to none rhyme or reason for the main relationship of this story. It felt like a desperate attempt to be seen, rather than love; it could have just as well been an intimate friendship. Admittedly I’m not a fan of romance, and obviously other readers seemed to have enjoyed this a lot more than I did. But it’s a little weird to be falling head over heels as an immortal 323 year being when you have known a guy only for a few days. That brings us to the love interest, Henry, who has little more of a personality than ‘bookshop seller’. His friends, though they are minor side characters, are some of the only minority representation in the book, but their presence in the book is ultimately worthless. Nothing they do actually matters to the plot. For that matter, Henry himself seems to matter little in the overall course of the story, which is partly why the ending felt so disappointing. I’m trying not to reveal too much, but Henry’s story seems to be sidelined by Addie’s.
As mentioned, this is a character study, so it makes sense that there is little in the way of plot. Instead, the reader gets a lot of inner monologues, which are a sort of stream-of-consciousness writing. This would work well in theory… if the characters are ones the reader actually cares about and has some attachment to. I don’t know who made it a popular tend in YA/NA fantasy to write like this, but whoever did should be fired and sent to the Bad Place. It’s extremely annoying and not a mark of good writing; instead it disrupts the reading flow and makes the book seem rather like a diary than a novel. (Actually, see Simona's review for a better explanation of this than I give here.) This is an example of what I mean:
I don’t get why authors like Schwab write like this.
I really don’t.
Schwab might think this is well-written.
Or even quirky.
But I tend to think it’s just annoying.
So annoying, in fact, that I’d rather trudge through War and Peace than read a novel like this.
War and Peace is an extremely long novel, if you didn’t know.
Pages upon pages of dense writing.
(No, I haven’t read it.)
Oh, and like text messages, every new sentence must be on a new line.
In short, this style is repetitive, speaks in grammatically incorrect sentence fragments, and offers up four or five different phrases that all embody the same idea—for what purpose? I guess the style tries to make the reader feel more intimate with Addie’s inner thoughts, or something. I don’t know, so I can only speculate—whatever its purpose, it did not work for me. First person or third person, either way, this style gets on my nerves.
As for the little narrative we do get, it is also repetitive. Since Addie is forgotten by the people she meets (with the singular exception, of course), every brief spark she has follows the exact same pattern. Even the same-sex relationships are little distinguished from the pattern. This also goes for her love interest, Henry, whose narratives follow a slightly different but similarly predictable pattern. There was nothing truly exciting in the narrative, and the few ‘twists’ we get were easy to predict. At the end of the novel, I was left wondering if anything that had happened in the novel makes much of a difference. I suppose this is also something the characters have to wrestle with, but in the life of an immortal being, how exactly is a few months or a year supposed to matter? Without giving too much away, the ending also seemed derivative, a bit of a cop-out. The premise establishes these stringent rules for the narrative, and Schwab, instead of trying to work out a clever resolution, just slaps a bow on it and calls it a day. As a reader, I can confidently say that the ending did not feel like a present. I read 400+ pages for... that?
So, like Addie herself, this book finds me at a crossroads… between enjoying it or not. At the very least this novel didn’t live up to my expectations, but there were kernels of ideas that had some promise. For a fantasy novel, there was not really much fantastical elements, besides the deal, which itself only serves as the catalyst for the narrative, not as a main feature of it. Still, I ended up liking Addie as a character, at least in the beginning; it was a bit more than I would have expected, honestly. But at the end of the novel, I did not find myself feeling attached to her or any other character, which is not ideal for a character study novel. Perhaps if there were more of a narrative besides ‘girl, who is not-like-other-girls, meets a special boy, a boy-not-like-the-others, falls in love, and there’s a tiny bit of fantasy’, I would have cared a bit more. This is my first Schwab book, and I’m a little hesitant to try her other works.
