The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

by V.E. Schwab

The darkness claimed he’d given her freedom, but really, there is no such thing for a woman, not in a world where they are bound up inside their clothes, and sealed inside their homes, a world where only men are given leave to roam. Addie saunters up the street, a stolen basket hooked over the elbow of her coat. Nearby, an old woman stands in a doorway, beating out a rug, and laborers lounge on café steps, and none of them so much as blink, because they do not see a woman, walking alone. They see a young man, barely more than a youth, dawdling in the dying light; they do not think how strange, how scandalous it is to see her strolling. They do not think anything at all. To think, Addie might have saved her soul, and simply asked for these clothes.

“Ah, you think me an idealist.” Addie lifts the coffee to her lips. “I think it comes more easily to men.” “It does,” he admits, before nodding at her attire. “And yet,” he says with an impish grin, “you strike me as someone not easily restrained. Aut viam invenium aut faciam, and so on.” She does not know Latin yet, and he does not offer a translation, but a decade from now, she will look up the words, and learn their meaning. To find a way, or make your own.