What do we want?
There are things everyone needs; characters worth rooting for, and that pull you into the story. Plot and imagery to hold you there. Pace to keep you turning pages, enough structure you don’t lose your way but not so much you can see the bones.
There are also things that are only about you. What you need from a book. For me it’s transportation: escape to another place. Specifically escape from real life. If it happens in the course of a normal human existence, it doesn’t give me what I need. I want the strange and impossible before breakfast. Magic, or it doesn’t matter. Most people are the opposite, I get that.
So, Addie La Rue.
The Invisible Life of Addie La Rue makes big promises right out of the gate. Big feelings, big story. Big promises.
Does Addie deliver?
Absolutely she does.
“A girl is running for her life.”
It’s the power of Addie’s longing that sweeps me into this story. By the time I meet the Darkness, feeling the first touch of his and Addie’s dangerous, flirtatious antagonism, I’m toast. The language is gorgeous, and the flit back and forth between Addie’s past and present keeps me on my toes. The love triangle is cursed; my favourite kind. The book doesn’t let me go until it’s done with me.
“Don’t you remember, she told him then, when you were nothing but shadow and smoke?
Darling, he’d said in his soft, rich way, I was the night itself.”
A beautiful, modern take on the old cautionary tale of be careful what you wish for. As rich as Addie’s favourite black coffee.
An enchanted midnight whisper of a recommend.
