Image by Michael Alfonso

REVIEW: (spoilers) Schwab masters the little heartbreaks. Her attention-to-detail, her line-by-line magic with words, she is masterful with description, metaphor, allegory and imagery and it is incredible to read. She clearly pays attention to each line down to the minutiae. The plot itself was new and exciting and reminiscent of tales of making deals with fae and being trapped by your own thoughtless words. 

It's a beautiful testimony to memory, forgetting and a person's legacy and provokes thought on the notions of what we leave behind even whilst we're alive and whether it's really a life well lived if we don't leave anything at all. 

The first thing that came to mind reading this novel was the notion of miniature heartbreaks. Tiny shatterings of hope or perception dangled in front of Addie and reader alike that someone somewhere will remember or that maybe this time her name will stay written in the sand. 

I only have a few minor critiques of this novel, one being the potential for holes and suggestions - 

• If Addie La Rue cannot make any permanent changes, how is it possible for her to plant the tree? It seems out of the lore, unless I am misunderstanding (happy to be corrected.

• It felt very long - as if the middle were filling in time for Henry to arrive and even then it was almost sludging through - as there was no conflict except the precedent set at the start of Addie's unsatisfying curse. I found that the majority of the conflict really came in the last few chapters when she had to choose to either accept henry's death or make another deal with the devil otherwise I found myself asking - what is the point, what is the motivation of the character here except to just keep living. Perhaps this is the charm - finding joy in a long existence out of the new and the artistic but part of me wanted Addie to decide that Henry's chance at life was more important than her chance at immortality. It might have felt more compelling that Addie just living more and more? But perhaps this is just the bias of someone who believes a human life should be just that, transient. 

Although I was certain the ending was travelling a specific way - with Addie sacrificing her immortality for Henry to get an average lifespan of his own, instead it seems her pride wins out and the devil wins in the end. I wasn't sure how I felt about this but I was pleasantly suprised my predictions weren't as spot on as first imagined. Though perhaps I would have liked Addie more if she had. 

In the end it was hard to tell if Addie was capable of love, at times the author seemed to hint that she was, only to retract it later, I felt it was caught between a hopelessly romantic love story and the enemies to lovers fan favourite but in the end didn't satisfyingly get either - perhaps the intention and ultimately again, subverted expectations. 

That being said, reader's cannot deny Schwab's ability to create novelty - it has been a long time since I read a plot which inspired me, a plot which really felt new. I can really see this book being translated into film e..g the transitions from the shadow world into the real world could really have a cinematic appeal. 

The book itself felt like a piece of art. Which is in itself a mean feat. Overall I love Schwab's writing style and just sheer talent with words.