New York Times best seller “The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue” written by V. E. Schwab is a story about a young girl who makes a deal with a god to live forever, but it comes with a catch–no one will ever remember her.

The story starts in France in 1714 and follows Addie LaRue, a young girl who is reaching the age where her family wants to marry her off. However, she does not want to give up her freedom. She makes little offerings to the old spirits of the Earth.

In return they keep her from being married off. An old woman who also practices this type of magic told her to never make offerings in the night because otherwise something dark might answer.

Her parents plan to marry her off and the night before her wedding, in a desperate moment she goes out to make an offer and calls out for someone to answer her. Something does answer her and agrees to give her everlasting life free from being tied down.

She finds out she wasn’t clear enough in what she was asking when she goes to talk to her mother, who doesn’t know who she is. She was given everlasting life, but no one remembers her. But 300 years later, she walks into a bookstore and tells a man her name is Addie and the next day, he remembers her.

The book immediately sucks the reader in with the magic and mystery of it all. The timeline switches between the beginning of Addie’s story and modern times. You get to see her struggle with the burden of living forever but never making an impact on anything.

In an interview with The New York Times the author V. E. Schwab said “The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is a tale of stubborn hope and defiant joy, about how far we will go to leave a mark on a world that is intent on forgetting us.”

There is love, art, joy, pain and sorrow all woven into this book, and it is an interesting look into what life means and how we all want to leave an impact on the world.