The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, V.E. Schwab
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue follows the 300-year life of Addie, a French girl born in the late 1600s who traded her soul for the freedom to live as she pleases and do what she wants. Of course, there is a catch (there always is): no one can remember her, and she is unable to leave a mark on anyone or anything. This begins with her parents and neighbors in the village, who don’t recognize her, and continues with strangers she has just met – as soon as a door shuts, or someone leaves a room, they have no recollection of her. She also cannot create anything – no leaving anything behind. This creates all kinds of technical problems, but Addie is more concerned with the emotional ones: how to be loved, how to love in return, and how to foster human connections. She is in present-day New York when she finally meets someone who can remember her, but just as they are discovering each other and the love they could share, he reveals that he has secrets of his own that could lead to the implosion of the fragile thing they have begun to build. Schwab is a fantastic storyteller, and with short chapters and biting prose, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue was a captivating story that I highly recommend.
Our Missing Hearts, Celeste Ng
Our Missing Hearts is set in a strangely dystopian world, reminiscent of 1984, which is at the same time both wholly foreign and immediately recognizable to those of us living in the present day. Bird’s mother has vanished from family home, and his father, refusing to speak her name, burns her things and makes Bird follow strict rules every day so as not to get in trouble. But, in trouble with whom? As Bird observes the world around him, he begins noticing that things don’t seem safe for Asian Americans like him, and then receives a bizarre letter in the mail from his mother, and sets off to find her. Ng’s novel is a stark reminder that democracy and all that comes with it—the freedom to be who we want, live how we want, and speak our minds—is just one election cycle away from disappearing from our grasp. As always, there is something about Ng’s writing that draws the reader in and makes the pages keep turning.