The Invisible Life of Addie Larue: A review

A girl born in a small French village in the 17^th Century, sees the life that is laid out for her, sees the marriage that has been arranged for her to an older man with kids from a previous marriage, sees the toil and heartache that is in store for her, and decides to run. She prays to the gods of nature that her friend has told her about, but the one who answers is darkness. We never really know if he is the Devil or a demon. She just refers to him as the Darkness. She buys freedom and life for as long as she wants it in exchange for her soul.

When she wakes, she discovers that no one knows her, not even her parents. She further discovers that once she disappears from someone’s view, they no longer remember meeting her. The title says invisible life. She is not invisible, but her "life" is, her existence is. No matter how long she lives she will leave no mark on the world.

It is hard not to put yourself in her shoes and realize how problematic such a life is. She cannot get a job, she cannot get a home, cannot make anything before it withers away, cannot keep any possessions as they always seem to disappear. Her only method of survival is stealing. The only shelter she can ever find are abandoned places. I think living such an existence would quickly drive me mad. That is no doubt what the demon is counting on. It is so unpleasant that she will surely surrender her life and he can collect her soul. But Addie is made of sterner stuff that he had counted on. We do get the sense of misery, wondering how she is even going to make it through the first few days. But she learns how to hide when she gets into trouble, learns how to steal, learns how to play the game well enough to survive.

The story zig-zags through time, one chapter set in 2014, the next during the French Revolution, and so on. Often that type of story-telling bothers me (I am a very linear person) but it works well in this story and is necessary to reveal the things that we need to learn in the order we need to learn them. Addie has been living this strange existence for 300 years before she meets someone that might possibly be a game changer.

The story was nominated for the Locus Award for best fantasy novel. It moves along at a good pace, and kept me involved throughout. It is well worth a read.

Star Liner

Comments

Second Wind

You have heard about athletes getting their second wind? It is not that they feel better, that they are warmed up and ready to run more easily. It is not psychological (at least, not all psychological). No. There is an actual physiological truth to a second wind. It all has to do with respiration. When I say respiration, I am not talking about breathing. Respiration is a biochemical process that happens at the cellular level. It is how the cell gets energy. There are lots of chemical processes that are constantly going on in each cell, and those processes require energy. Without a constant feed of energy, the cell will die. The more demands there are on a cell, the more energy it needs. For example, every one of your muscle cells need more energy when you are running. In fact, you won’t be able to run if the cells don’t have sufficient energy for it. The energy currency of the cell is a molecule called ATP. You may have heard that sugar is how our bodies get energy, wh...

Roy Batty Figures it out

This is written with the assumption that the reader has seen the film Blade Runner . If you haven’t, you may not get much out of it. In one of the last scenes in Blade Runner , the killer android Roy Batty, who holds Deckard’s life in his hands, has a remarkable speech: “I've seen things... seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments... will be lost in time like tears in the rain. Time to die.” I am told that the speech that was written was not working very well, and Rutger Hauer was told to just improvise something. Wow. He nailed it. At this point in the film Roy Batty has been the villain throughout. We have been rooting for Deckard (Harrison Ford) to take him out, but it is not going well, and it seems like Batty is about to kill him. At the last second, Roy Batty pulls Deckard up, to keep him from falling to his death. Then he delivers this...

The Outsider

I am reading The Outsider by Stephen King. The first 150 pages or so I found disturbing. Not for the reason you might think. It is not scary, not creepy in a traditional horror way, but disturbing in a tragic way. The first hundred to 150 pages is tragedy on top of tragedy. The most disturbing thing to me (it is disturbing to me anytime I encounter it in any story) is a false accusation. A man is falsely accused and may well be convicted of a horrific crime. That kind of thing disturbs my soul. It makes the whole world seem wrong. I have always been disturbed by stories with that kind of thing. And why not? It happens in real life too. That makes it all the more horrific. In the Jim Crow South, all you had to do was make an accusation against a black man to set the lynch mob in action. No need to bother with a trial. But even if there was a trial, the outcome was a foregone conclusion, innocent or not. We see Vladimir Putin inventing charges against people and they get locked up...

A speculative mind

Search This Blog