A young woman who wants freedom from her provincial life makes a deal with the devil, but the price is that she’s forgotten the moment she leaves anyone’s sight.

I loved reading this book, as the words were so easy, the story was engaging, and it ran the gamut of emotional range effectively. It was clear from the start that this book was not about the main character participating or even observing three hundred years of history, as I had been expecting. She barely comments on it, because the story is about Addie, not history, and the way she tries to find meaning in life when she’s forgotten the moment she’s out of sight. Addie experiences hardship until she figures out how to manipulate life to survive. Even then, she tries to find a way to leave her mark, almost always through art. All of these snippets of her life, whether they are in the 1700s or 2014 (there is very little in between), are fascinating, and sometimes very sad. So when she meets Henry, who does remember her, she’s wary and joyful at the same time. I thought it was a trap to get her to surrender her soul, finally being content with life, but I was wrong. Henry’s backstory isn’t nearly as interesting as Addie’s, and while the resolution is predictable, it was also kept interesting. The entire book is about emotional legacy, which she tries to fill with sex, then one-sided relationships. Hearing a song that she taught a singer, though he doesn’t remember her, brings her to tears. I also loved the way her relationship with Luc, the devil, changes with time, going from hate to adversary to love, in a form of Stockholm Syndrome. While the book wasn’t everything I thought it would be from the cover description, there were so many amazing moments that I couldn’t put it down, while at the same time needing to put it down because I wanted it to last longer. It was a beautiful book.

I was enchanted by Addie, and although I really liked the book, it didn’t rise to the five-star quality until more than a quarter of the way through, when Addie finds Henry. Their newfound joy and wariness was breathtaking. This, in a book whose prose was so easy to read and beautifully written, was a joy to experience. I spent hours at a time reading this story, something I’m not often able to do these days. I would put it down, only to pick it up again a short time later and continue.

There isn’t much to the plot, except that Addie is trying to leave her mark, to find happiness, and to live. She sees her friend get married and have kids, repeating a provincial cycle to end up like her parents –knowing nothing except her own little town in France. So she runs off on the way to her own wedding, and makes a deal with an old god, one that the local wise woman warned never to speak with –the ones that answer after dark. She wants her freedom, to not belong to anyone. She wants to live, until she’s tired of living. And the old god agrees. In a moment, she’s completely forgotten, the price she didn’t ask about, in addition to her soul. Yet by the end of the book, she’d still make that same deal, because she’s learned so much, seen so much.

To me, it’s not a pitfall that we get to see so little of what Addie has seen in her three hundred years. That would take a huge saga to tell, and I’m sure it would be very difficult to keep interesting. The description of the book's back cover is a little misleading that way, but what we got was better, in a way. I thought we would at least get to see Addie’s reaction to her village being decimated by German attacks, completely destroyed in either of the World Wars, but that didn’t happen, and I think the village survived. We get one scene where she’s been captured by German soldiers and put into a jail cell after trying to be an invisible spy, and she has to be rescued by her old god. The scene doesn’t fit well into the story, as if somebody said Addie should experience history, and the author decided to oblige.

Even so, I’m amazed at how little Addie actually lived, after pleading and begging for a deal so that she could see the world. She lived through so much, but barely left France (except for a short jaunt in Italy) until World War I forced her to flee. As far as I recall, she travels to a few different countries, but never goes out of her comfortable part of the world, never goes to Australia or South America, Africa or Mexico. I wonder if it’s because she would need to get a train, boat or plane ticket, and her experience (especially coming to America) shows that it’s very difficult when everyone forgets who she is. On the other hand, I don’t see Addie as one to shy away from difficult or uncomfortable, especially after the first year of torture she put up with.

Most of the world’s history is blurred as Addie gets used to living on her own, learning how to become invisible even to those who are watching. The chapters of her early life are interspersed with the ones from 2014 in New York, so the story advances on two fronts. The early story shows how even her parents don’t know her, nor the people in the town, even her friend. There are some very heartbreaking scenes as she faces the reality that nobody knows her. In time, she pokes and prods at the limits of her curse, finding small ways to leave her mark.

This is where the book shines. Addie works hard to survive the tough life she is forced to live, giving in to selling her body, stealing, knowing that nobody will remember her if she gets far enough ahead of them. She’s kicked out of inns for taking up space they don’t remember she paid for, and is even picked up for dead in an alley during an epidemic. But when she figures it out, when she follows an Italian guy home to bed, and is shown what erotic pleasure feels like, or when she meets someone under the right circumstances so it makes a difference, she learns quickly. She meets the same guy several nights in a row, and his paintings of her persist, not real depictions, but art, with an artist’s touch. She sneaks into an upper-class party and is seen with famous artists or gossipers, but only after trying different techniques for more than a week. Later, she influences a musician to create a melody that she herself taught him, but he can’t remember her, only the vestiges of her playing. It’s a subtle living, and it takes a lot of work. Not every author could write this kind of subtlety; this one succeeds abundantly. One of my favorite moments was with Sam, remembering the woman she fell in love with for weeks, over and over, but deciding not to go through that pain again. It was so sad, but beautiful at the same time.

Every anniversary of her deal with the old god, he returns to her, and asks if she’s ready to surrender her soul, if she’s had enough living. In the early days, she’s tempted, because her life is so poor and dreadful, but she’s stubborn, and doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction. He takes on the personality of a man she made up on her sketchpad in her pre-cursed life, the man she fantasized about, whom she called Luc. Given how closely his personality fits that of Lucifer, the name sticks.

Their relationship becomes one of co-dependence through the three hundred years. He would visit her to make her life more miserable, getting her thrown out of prestigious parties, turning people into puppets to serve them dinner (this is a pivotal moment in the book, where she realizes that Luc has more of an interest in her than other souls), showing her his true self as he forcefully takes a soul (Beethoven). But she also sees his gentler side, as he accepts an old woman’s soul when she’s accepted her fate. Luc begins to lust after her, and while she drives him away, she dreads his reappearance, and yet dreads his absence even more. It’s an erotic dream and a form of Stockholm Syndrome. She can’t live without him, conjuring him up when he’s been gone thirty years, hating herself for doing it.

Through the years, as she becomes lonely, and Luc is the only one who can even say her name, so she longs for that feeling of recognition, because her feeble attempts through art are not enough. Eventually, she takes him to bed, and he is the perfect lover, the perfect gentleman. In a way, he even respects her. Then she realizes what she’s done, and burns the house down.

Then one day, after living in New York for years, she discovers a hidden book store, and meets Henry. She steals a book and he catches her, but gives her the book anyway. When she comes back to steal another book, he remembers her. It’s such a shocking development that she’s speechless, in tears, happy and doubtful all at once. After work, he still remembers her. The next day, too. For Addie, it’s a novelty. He can even write her name, say her name, but he writes down all of her stories, compiling them in his notebooks. Addie lives each day in joyous pleasure and a heightened state of fear that it can’t last.

It’s crazy that their meeting and hooking up occurs about a quarter of the way into the book, and I wondered if she would move on to other people, because how could three quarters of the book offer anything more exciting? But it does, as she shows him unique pieces of New York, and he does the same. I wonder if any of these places exist, but if not it seems like they should, as New York would be the logical place for clubs in abandoned subway tunnels, light and sound shows in the park, and so many more, each more different than the last.

The story takes a darker turn when we learn about Henry’s past, that he also made a deal with Luc. From the way he tells it, though, Luc came looking for him. “You’ll be perfect,” he says, implying that he wants Henry for Addie’s use. My thought was that Henry was a trap, that Luc would give her the life and love she always wanted, letting them live out the next forty or fifty years, until she was content, like the old woman, and gave herself freely. I still think that would have been a great story, but the author didn’t think that way. Henry had been through a couple of tumultuous relationships with a guy and a couple of girls, finally asking Tabitha to marry him. She said no, and he was ready to jump off a roof. Luc offers him his wish of being loved. So Henry goes through agony as people fawn fakely over him, until he meets Addie, who doesn’t have that strange glint in her eye that everyone else does. I wish I could say this part of the story was as beautiful as the first part, but I was much less interested, and couldn’t wait to get back to Addie’s history.

So Addie and Henry live together to the fullest, and love together as much as possible. She offers him the love he desires so much, calming the storm in his mind, and he gives her immortality –real immortality, to be remembered, her stories, her blurry photographs, and shared experiences. He learns to introduce her to his friends every day, or when they return from the bathroom, or after getting drinks, or any time they turn around. It doesn’t phase him, though we can see it still takes a toll on her. Then they are at a concert where an upcoming star plays the song she taught him, and she breaks down.

Finally, on the three hundredth anniversary of her curse, they spend the day together, knowing that Luc will show up at some point. He wouldn’t miss such a momentous anniversary. At a bar, Luc buys her a drink, and tells her about Henry’s curse, the part Henry couldn’t bear to tell her –that he asked for happiness for one year, and that year is coming to a close. Addie is furious, both at Luc and at Henry, but gets over it as they decide to live out his last few weeks with as much experience as they can get.

On the night of his impending death, they dance together, be together, for each other. Back on the rooftop, Henry counts down the seconds. Instead of dying, though, Addie tells him of the deal she made, to remove his curse, and spend the rest of her life with Luc, until he tires of her. She was clever enough to phrase her deal in terms that would give her an out, allowing her to keep her soul even after he no longer wants her at his side. I like the ending, but it felt a little tame for the amazing book it concluded.

There is an epilog, where Addie, I guess away while Luc is busy collecting souls, finds a bookshop with her name in the window –plastered with the covers of a book written by Henry about her. Although it seems presumbptrous to give Henry's story about Addie the same name as the book the author wrote, and saying it was a great story, I can put that aside. It's Addie's lasting legacy at last.