Panicked, she runs away to the forest hoping and praying for freedom, but she forgets the cardinal rule: “Never pray to the gods that answer after dark.”
“What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind?” is a question explored in depth in American fantasy writer V E Schwab’s latest novel. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue begins in the quaint setting of late-17th-century Vuillon, France. Adeline, or Addie, yearns for adventure from the moment her father lets her tag along to a market, and when she discovers charcoal and paper, she lets her imagination run wild. Life is slow and small but she dreams on.
When Addie turns 23, she faces being forced to marry and relinquish her wild fantasies. She yearns to be a tree instead: “If she must grow roots, she would rather be left to flourish wild, instead of pruned, would rather stand alone, allowed to grow beneath the open sky. Better than firewood, cut down just to burn in someone else’s hearth.”
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