What a beautifully written book. V. E. Schwab writes some gorgeous prose and noteworthy lines, and that’s what I want to share first:
- “She lied, but only because she can’t say her real name–one of the vicious little details tucked like nettles in the grass.”
- “Addie has had three hundred years to practice her father’s art, to whittle herself down to a few essential truths, to learn the things she cannot do without.”
- “Addie feels like a museum sometimes, one only she can visit.”
- “Remy Laurent is laughter bottled into skin.”
The novel primarily focuses on Addie and the deal she makes with an ancient god to make a more free life for herself, in exchange for her soul. As part of the deal, she is cursed to have no one remember her, aside from the god who make the deal. Until, one day, someone else does remember her. I wish that I hadn’t even known that much when I started the book. Although we find out about the deal Addie makes within the first 10% of the novel, I think it would have been so cool to go in completely blind and wonder why people aren’t remembering her.
The novel is especially captivating in the beginning as we learn what led Addie to make the deal and as she learns about the painful, unexpected details embedded in that deal. The book alternates timelines between present day (2014) and Addie’s life leading up to 2014, with particular focus on her learning to survive the early days of the curse, and we see how she goes from surviving to truly living because she doesn’t want to miss any of the beauty that the world holds.
This is a character-driven book, which automatically makes for slow pacing, and that is especially the case in this novel. There’s plot, but mostly we just see snippets of Addie’s life until we get to 2014. We also spend time getting to know, along with Addie, more about the god who made the deal with her, and I think Schwab did an excellent job of making him more than human but somehow still having human-like reactions and flaws. He’s more like a Greek god in that way, rather than how some people might view a higher power these days.
I enjoyed the characters in the novel and the themes around making a meaningful life and whether you have really lived if you can’t make a lasting mark in life. I can see how the ending might be polarizing for some, but to me it was a logical extension of everything that came before. I definitely recommend it to fans of slow-paced, character driven novels with fantastical elements. This is my first V. E. Schwab book but won’t be my last.