The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

by V.E. Schwab

“I see someone who cares,” she says slowly. “Perhaps too much. Who feels too much. I see someone lost, and hungry. The kind of person who feels like they’re wasting away in a world full of food, because they can’t decide what they want.”

A boy is born with a broken heart. The doctors go in, and piece it back together, make it whole, and the baby is sent home, lucky to be alive. They say he is better now, that he can live a normal life, and yet, as he grows up, he is convinced something is still wrong inside. The blood pumps, the valves open and close, and on the scans and screens, everything functions as it should. But something isn’t right. They’ve left his heart too open. Forgotten to close back up the armor of his chest. And now he feels … too much. Other people would call him sensitive, but it is more than that. The dial is broken, the volume turned all the way up. Moments of joy register as brief, but ecstatic. Moments of pain stretch long and unbearably loud. When his first dog dies, Henry cries for a week. When his parents argue, and he cannot bear the violence in their words, he runs away from home. It takes more than a day to bring him back. When David throws away his childhood bear, when his first girlfriend, Abigail, stands him up at the dance, when they have to dissect a pig in class, when he loses the card his grandfather gave him before he passed, when he finds Liz cheating on him during their senior trip, when Robbie dumps him before junior year, every time, no matter how small, or how big, it feels like his heart is breaking again inside his chest. Henry is fourteen the first time he steals a swig of his father’s liquor, just to turn the volume down. He is sixteen when he swipes two pills f...

I don’t know that I’ve ever felt so seen in a book. This is what my heart feels like. I struggle to put it into words most days.

Blink, and you’re halfway through school, paralyzed by the idea that whatever you choose to do, it means choosing not to do a hundred other things, so you change your major half a dozen times before finally ending up in theology, and for a while it seems like the right path, but that’s really just a reflex to the pride on your parents’ faces, because they assume they’ve got a budding rabbi, but the truth is, you have no desire to practice, you see the holy texts as stories, sweeping epics, and the more you study, the less you believe in any of it. Blink, and you’re twenty-four, and you travel through Europe, thinking—hoping—that the change will spark something in you, that a glimpse of the greater, grander world will bring your own into focus. And for a little while, it does. But there’s no job, no future, only an interlude, and when it’s over, your bank account is dry, and you’re not any closer to anything. Blink, and you’re twenty-six, and you’re called into the dean’s office because he can tell that your heart’s not in it anymore, and he advises you to find another path, and he assures you that you’ll find your calling, but that’s the whole problem, you’ve never felt called to any one thing. There is no violent push in one direction, but a softer nudge a hundred different ways, and now all of them feel out of reach. Blink and you’re twenty-eight, and everyone else is now a mile down the road, and you’re still trying to find it, and the irony is hardly lost on you that i...