The TL;DR version of the review is that I really loved the story in this book, but I thought it was way too long. And because it was long and just okay from a writing standpoint, I'm going to discuss the entire plot because I think it's a story worth talking about.

So you know the drill:

A woman named Addie LaRue is born in 1714 to a simple family in rural France. Deciding that she doesn't want the simple, constrained life of an uneducated woman who will just be expected to marry and raise children, she makes a pact with some sort of dark deity (presumably the devil or something similar). The pact she makes is that he will give her an untethered life that will last as long as she wants it to, and then he'll get her soul when she's done living her life. In the grand design of Faustian bargains, he (a character Addie will later come to call Luc) puts a twist on it and curses her to be forgotten by everyone she meets. She can't say her own name, and anyone who meets her literally forgets her the moment she's out of sight. If she goes to bed with someone after spending a whole night together, they wake up with no knowledge of who she is. If she leaves the room and comes back a moment later, the people she's talking with look at her like she's a complete stranger.

Luc is sure that, after a few years of being adrift in a world that will never acknowledge her and which she can't leave a mark upon, she'll tire of the bargain she made and give up her soul. Luc makes a point of visiting Addie every so often, to tempt her to give up, and to taunt her with the fact that only he remembers who she is. But he didn't count on how stubborn Addie is, and she manages to eke out some kind of existence over the course of three hundred years, getting a front row seat to some of the most amazing historical milestones along the way. She truly does live a life of adventure and seeing the world that she's always wanted.

The book is told out of order, but from a chronological perspective, there's a point where Luc and Addie develop a relationship. They spend time together, seek companionship in one another, and Addie genuinely wonders whether Luc might be as lonely as she is, because he just constantly reaps souls and she's the only one that has stuck around long enough to get to know him at all. It turns out that it's (likely) a ploy by Luc to manipulate her and see if he can break her spirit. Playing with her emotions and tempting her to give in is an amusement for him.

Years later (2014, which is present day in the book), Addie meets a boy named Henry Strauss who does remember her. Addie is fascinated by the fact that he can remember when no one else for three hundred years has been able to... and she learns that it's because he made a deal with the devil too. He was a sad loner who never felt seen by other people, so his wish was that anyone who saw him saw the idealized version of whatever they wanted. If someone cared mostly about looks, they'd see the handsomest person they'd ever met. If someone cared about a sense of humor, he'd be the funniest person ever. Since Addie wants more than anything to be remembered by someone, that's what he's able to do for her.

My one complaint about the book is that Addie spends an awful lot of time assuming she's getting one by Luc with this scenario. That she just happened to meet a guy by chance who just happened to be cursed by the same devil and their curses just happened to "cancel each other's out" and allow them to find happiness. I mean, c'mon. It was obviously that this is yet another of Luc's ploys to get her, and it takes her way too long to realize it. Luc's plan was to show her how fleeting and painful humanity is, and how Addie isn't even really human anymore (since she lives forever and is disconnected from the rest of the human race).

The twist is that Henry's bargain with Luc wasn't for a lifetime; it was for a single year. So while Addie will live forever as long as she doesn't give in, her time being remembered and loved by someone will only last for a few more months, and it'll be all the more painful having loved and lost, than never having loved at all. Or so the saying goes.

Here's where I really appreciate the book and the crafting of the story, though. Addie desperately tries to make a deal with Luc to save Henry, and Luc seems to slip up ever so slightly (he has come to have some true affection, or at least respect for Addie and the way she's resisted him all these years). She learns that pacts can't be invalidated but they can be changed... that the specific wording matters; it's what gives Luc the loopholes he needs to twist the pacts against the other party... and he seems genuinely fond of Addie in a "you're the only one who really understands me" kind of way.

Addie then uses that information to accomplish two things. If Luc agrees to spare Henry, Addie will change her deal to stay with Luc as long as he wants her company. And Henry, now left to live out his days, uses his intact memories of Addie, to transcribe her story and put it out into the world in a form of a bestselling book. Addie is reinvigorated by the fact that she genuinely found a loophole so that someone, anyone will remember her... and then sets out on the next phase of her goal... making sure that Luc eventually gets tired of having her tag along with him, because the new deal was that he would let her go when he got tired of her. He thinks he'll outlast her, but if the whole narrative of the book has told us anything, Addie is stubborn and won't go down without a fight. And she's determined to take her immortality and be free of Luc once and for all.

Like I mentioned above, other than the fact that Addie didn't see the Henry angle coming (even after 300 years of Luc playing some really long cons to toy with her emotions), and other than the fact that the author seemed a little too enamored with the "show Addie living through some of history's most memorable moments" device, and let that part of the story go on for far too long with far too many chapters and examples. But other than that, the book was great. The character of Addie was fantastic, her relationship with Luc was fascinating and complicated, and the story itself was a real banger.

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Created Jan 18, 2025 at 12:53pm • Submit your own review...