genre: adult slipstream
When Addie LaRue makes a deal with the dark, all she knows is that she cannot, can NOT live the life that is ahead of her. Whatever she must give up to be free, it will be worth it. Except, of course, when dealing with the Dark, you don't really get to choose the terms of your deal. And for Addie, the price for her freedom is that she is utterly and completely forgotten - by everyone she's ever known and by everyone she will ever meet. Throughout history, for centuries, Addie will figure out how to live without ever being truly seen, until, one day, she is.
I want go swimming inside this book. I want to type up the mind blown emoji and just leave it at that. I want to waltz with it under a night full of stars. It has been a long time since a book took me to the edge of anything I could've imagined and that just let me stay there, being surprised over and over by what human minds can imagine. Maybe I'm overstating - maybe it was the right book at the right time for my frame of mind - but for me, this was a delight in a literary and creative sense. I loved that when two days ago I heard a new bookish word - slipstream - a genre that is defined as a work that "crosses conventional genre boundaries between science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction" I thought to myself YES! Addie LaRue! I know exactly that slipstream books are! And one is currently knocking my socks off!
The writing is so dang good, so lush and appealing. Addie is complicated and spunky and many lifetime's worth of human emotion. The way the plot twists, the constant back in forth in time - even on the audio, it never threw me. I never felt like the ground wasn't beneath my feet as we see present day Addie and all the Addies who came before that live inside her still, that led her to the present. I was completely enthralled by her connection to the Dark - its intricacies and complexities, I just could never figure it out completely, I loved being kept guessing. I loved how Addie manages to leave her own kind of footprint. I loved the other relationship she manages to hold on to and and and and and. It just kept feeling so striking, in all the ways I enjoy.
I guess I'm gushing, it's okay. It won't be for everyone - it's not all happiness and rainbows and, like my friend Melissa said, maybe it borders on maudlin. But apparently that's exactly what I needed right now. Because I loved it.
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