A young woman pleads with a dark god to save her from a forced marriage and the small, hard life of a French villager in the early 1700s. Her wish is, cruelly, granted. She gets a vast but lonely eternal life of being continually forgotten, not just day after day, but moment after moment — and there's not a moment of it that she can forget. As she struggles to find meaning, identity, and purpose in that existence, the dark god returns, time and again, reminding her that she can end the struggle by surrendering her soul. And so it goes for 300 years. Until a young man working in a Brooklyn bookstore inexplicably, impossibly remembers her.

This is a sweeping, lyrical, historical, literary fantasy that makes me think of the writing of Erin Morgenstern and Madeline Miller. It's somehow deeply fulfilling yet completely unsettling. And I can't get that ending and all of its implications out of my head. That's pretty good for an invisible, forgettable girl.

Content notes: death, desperate prostitution, violence, depression, attempted suicide, excessive drinking, self-medicating, emotional manipulation