The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is a 2020 novel 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.
Tropes:
- Affably Evill: Luc.
- A Form You Are Comfortable With: Luc takes the appearance of Addie's fantastic "stranger" in order to talk with her, but his real form appears to be an indescribable array of shadows.
- Age Without Youth: Luc briefly demonstrates this to Addie when she complains about his harsh interpretation of her wish, demonstrating that he could be much more violent if he wished.
- Alone in a Crowd: The reality of her curse sinks in for Addie while in a crowded market, realizing nobody there really sees her or will ever remember she was even there.
- A Match Made in Stockholm: Addie and Luc.
- Arranged Marriage: Addie is forced into marrying someone she doesn't really love. Running away from it starts the plot.
- Artistic License – History: During World War II, Addie gets captured in France by the occupying Germans and thrown into prison in Orléans in November 1944. The Germans had been expelled from Orléans earlier that summer. By November most of France had been liberated.
- The Bad Guy Wins: Luc more or less gets everything he wants. Whether or not it will last is open to interpretation.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Both Addie and Henry's wishes pretty much immediately go disastrously wrong.
- Addie wishes for freedom from responsibility to other people and time to live her life. So she's made immortal and cursed to be immediately forgotten by everyone she meets, and unable to leave any mark on the world. This leaves her entirely unable to live a normal life, build relationships, own property, or find love.
- Henry wishes to live up to everybody's expectations and to be "enough" for people. Afterwards, everyone projects their desires and expectations onto him, leaving him unable to maintain any "real" relationships as everyone just sees what they want to see in him.
- In both cases, Luc simply points out he gave them exactly what they wished for, and it's not his fault if they don't like it.
- Been There, Shaped History: Both Addie and Luc shape the history of western art by inspiring or otherwise aiding some of the biggest artists in modern history, from Shakespeare to Beethoven to Wagner.
- Big "WHY?!": Addie yells into the night sky demanding to know why Luc has cursed her so.
- Bittersweet Ending: Addie will be remembered forever after a great novel is made about her, and Henry is allowed to live. However, Henry will still die naturally, Luc will still get Henry's soul, Addie never breaks her own curse, and Addie agrees to stay at Luc's side as long as he wishes her to.
- Cannot Spit It Out: Addie is physically prohibited from saying her real name. While she can explain the truth, everyone except Henry seems incapable of hearing or processing it, reacting as though they had temporarily zoned out.
- The Charmer: Henry essentially becomes this. Only problem is, he can't turn it off.
- Clingy Macguffin: Addie in the modern day sections cannot get rid of Luc's wooden ring, no matter how she tries.
- Cope by Creating: Addie can't make any mark on the world directly, but she can inspire others to do so, even if she's doomed to never be recognized as the inspiration. She spends a lot of time inspiring works of art.
- Cursed with Awesome: Sure, she's effectively a ghost, but Addie's deal does have upsides.
- Addie can effectively go anywhere and do anything she wants. She spends three hundred years touring the world and witnessing great events.
- Because everyone forgets interactions with her, she can infinitely re-try any social interaction until she gets it right. Addie learns to manipulate people quite well, not by being a master manipulator, but by being able to try over and over again, gaining knowledge each time.
- It's very easy to be a thief when nobody remembers who you are.
- Dark Is Not Evil: Luc describes himself this way.
- Deal with the Devil: Addie asks to be freed from an obliged life of arranged marriage, child-rearing, and early death. The price? Why, her soul, of course!
- Didn't See That Coming: Addie steals a book from a bookstore, even having a confrontation with the employee there. She then goes to return it, for cash, not 24 hours later. Of course, after 300 years, she really didn't think that random single employee would happen to be the only person in the world who could remember who she is.
- Didn't Think This Through: Addie takes a while to learn the ropes of her curse, learning several lessons the hard way.
- Renting a room at an inn doesn't work very well when the innkeep immediately forgets who you are, that you rented the room, and that you paid.
- Waking up in the arms of a lover is a lot less romantic when they don't know who you are and assume they had too much to drink the night before.
- Being forgotten isn't the same as being invisible: Addie still must rely on stealth when stealing, for example, although she can at least attempt to run away until she's out of sight.
- Addie really, *really* should have considered that with both herself and Henry having made deals with Luc, Luc was probably not ignorant of their having found one another. Especially since Luc has been watching her for three hundred years.
- Oddly enough, Addie also has this problem in reverse - after three hundred years of not needing to worry about her reputation or relationship with other people, dealing with someone who actually does remember her is a challenge.
- Divine Date: Addie and Luc's relationship begins to appear distinctly romantic in nature. Because it is.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: Luc's relationship to Addie increasingly resembles an abusive romantic partner rather than a dark god and their mortal plaything.
- Double Standard: Rape, Sci-Fi: The book starts in the aftermath Addie having sex with a guy, knowing full well that he would not remember their encounter. He has no knowledge of consenting, and there is no evidence that Addie told him he would forget her before he made the choice. Plus, Addie apparently has done this often, having her way with others without them ever remembering that they consented.
- Dramatic Irony: Addie can immediately tell Robbie is in love with Henry, and wonders how Henry doesn't see it. The reader, of course, knows that Henry is deliberately trying to ignore it, regretful for how his curse has affected his friends.
- Driven to Suicide: Henry first meets Luc while contemplating suicide.
- The Eeyore: Henry unambiguously has a depressive disorder, and the warped perspective of a depressed person is thoroughly explored.
- Even the Guys Want Him: Henry attracts quite a few guys as well as women.
- Exact Words: Addie tells Luc he can have her soul "when she's done with it." Luc later points out it's simply in his own best interest to make Addie's existence miserable.
- Addie later attempts the same thing against Luc, agreeing to stay by his side as long as he wants her to. He agrees. Her plan is to find a way to hurt him until he no longer wants her there.
- Foreshadowing: Addie believes herself to be a "victim" of Henry's curse, but from Henry's perspective Addie never has the "frost" over her eyes denoting altered perception. It's not until much later that Luc admits he deliberately brought the two of them together. Addie's immunity to Henry's curse, and vice-versa, isn't a mistake on his part.
- Pay close attention to the time Henry's watch displays. It's counting down to his death, one "hour" a month.
- Even Evil Has Standards: Luc is vocally anti-war, among other things.
- Gay Paree: Much of the 1700s end of the plot takes place in Paris, which is romanticized heavily until Addie actually gets there and learns what early-modern cities were really like.
- Gray Rain of Depression: Henry on the day Tabitha breaks up with him and he meets Luc.
- Her Boyfriend's Jacket: Addie's leather jacket in the 2014 scenes.
- I Didn't Mean to Turn You On: Henry enjoys all the positive attention from everyone...for a little while.
- Jackass Genie: Luc claims to be simply fulfilling their wish, but in both Addie and Henry's cases it's clear he goes well beyond what is strictly necessary to do so. For instance, he also adds an inability for Addie to explain her circumstances or say her name, and makes sure Henry always sees when others' perception of him is altered. Luc even argues that the wording of Addie's wish merely incentivizes him to make it miserable.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: Happens to literally everybody Addie meets. As soon as she's out of their sight, even just a briefly-closed door, they forget anything having to do with her. It even happens to reality itself in a sense - anything Addie writes down fades, her very footprints disappear, anyone she injures immediately recovers.
- Like an Old Married Couple: Henry and Bea.
- Like Brother and Sister: Also Henry and Bea. Notably, after Henry is cursed to be "enough" in the eyes of everyone else, Bea is not attracted to him like almost all women are (apparently even curses can't get around Incompatible Orientation). She sees him as an ideal friend, and this is so close to normal Henry spends months unable to figure out how Bea has actually changed at all.
- Living Mood Ring: Luc's eye color changes with his mood, although it's always a shade of green.
- Lonely Together: One major reason Henry and Addie are attracted to each other is each one's ability to understand what the other is going through.
- Loophole Abuse: Addie can't make any mark on the world herself. She can interact with others. This includes physically holding their hand and having their hand make a mark on the world.
- Louis Cypher: Addie nicknames the dark god 'Luc'.
- Love Dodecahedron: Robbie → Henry ↔ Addie ↔ Luc...And that's not including all the minor relationships both Henry and Addie have.
- Magic Contract Romance: Addie and Luc.
- Mind-Control Eyes: Henry sees people's eyes glaze over, described as being like frost, when his curse alters their perception of him. This means he can never lie to himself or forget that what they're seeing isn't real.
- Muggle in Mage Custody: Addie has this kind of relationship with Luc: he is a supernatural entity who cursed her, whom she is dependent on, and with whom she has a love-hate relationship.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Addie does not take it well when the full weight of writing herself out of Villon's history makes itself apparent.
- Noodle Incident: Addie references a number of historical encounters we don't actually see, like flying an aircraft for the first time.
- Once More, with Clarity: It's not immediately apparent the first time we view the scene that Henry's deal was made as he was standing at the edge of a roof contemplating suicide.
- Paranormal Romance: Addie falls in love with Luc for well over a decade across the 60s and 70s. Luc's attraction to Addie may, or may not, be this as well.
- Pragmatic Villainy: Luc is perfectly happy to offer his deals to people who are inebriated, mentally ill, or on drugs.
- Luc founds a series of dim, dark speakeasies across the 1920s. Why? Because it's an excellent place to find emotionally-vulnerable people in a place to make a bad choice.
- Questionable Consent: Both Addie and Henry really bring up the question of people they sleep with are really consenting due to the effect's of their respective curses. In Addie's case, people forget her as soon as their back is turned or if they fall asleep, so they have no memory of meeting this girl or agreeing to have sex with her. For Henry, people perception of him is altered to "be enough" for them, so it's almost like a magical version of catfishing.
- Relationship Reveal: It's not clear what exactly happened in New Orleans until late in the book, when it's revealed Addie and Luc had a loving relationship together, which ended when Luc asked Addie to surrender her soul and claimed to have acted the entire time.
- Required Secondary Powers: A big part of Addie's curse is a lack of these. She is immortal and has no need to eat, but will still feel painful hunger pangs if she doesn't. She can't be physically harmed, but any injury still hurts just as much. She can walk endlessly without exhaustion, but her feet still hurt after long enough. She even succumbs to hypothermia!
- Her perfect memory lacks the requisite ability to efficiently sort through and index memories, which are so perfectly remembered as to be re-experienced later. By the 2010s, Addie has some tendency to get lost in memories and zone out.
- Unreliable Narrator: The reader is only told most of our information about Henry's family dynamics and relationships from Henry's point of view, which is clearly distorted by severe depression. Though it's clear Henry isn't making it all up, it's somewhat open to interpretation just how bad, or not, his family life really is.
- The reader is only told how deals work and what can or can't be done with them by Luc, who isn't exactly trustworthy about it. Notably, he claims he cannot simply alter up a deal once agreed, but later states he can "bend" the rules of an agreement.
- Savvy Guy, Energetic Girl: Addie and Henry have this dynamic.
- Secret Test of Character: Luc tells Addie that he'll spare Henry's soul if she nominates another to take his place from a crowd of random, unrelated people. Addie does pick someone; Luc doesn't act on it, merely telling her that she's changed over the years.
- Sex for Solace: Addie.
- Henry tries this. It doesn't work.
- Stealth Hi/Bye: This is more or less the only means by which Luc enters a scene.
- This Is Reality: Henry falls for Luc's offer despite being familiar with Faustian bargains in fantasy because this sort of thing doesn't happen in real life, so Luc must be some kind of drug-induced hallucination.
- Tsundere: Luc. Maybe.
- Villainous Crush: Luc develops one towards Addie. Addie suspects it's because she grows to know him more than anyone else could, though Luc denies this.
- Wham Line: "I remember you."
- What Is This Thing You Call "Love"?: Despite claiming to love Addie, Addie suspects Luc fundamentally doesn't understand how humans feel love and seeks to prove it.
- Who Wants to Live Forever?: Defied. Addie genuinely believes that she will never run out of wonder and beauty to experience in the world, or at least not as long as human civilization exists.
- Who Writes This Crap?!: Bea criticizes the end of the In-Universe novel, ''The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue" as being an unsatisfying and abrupt ending.
- Yandere: An early victim of Henry's supernatural attractiveness is a barista who's so incensed by Henry having a box of Tabitha's things, she lights it all on fire in his kitchen.
- Your Days Are Numbered: Henry. By the time he tells Addie, he only has a month to live.
