This review contains spoilers.

Quick summary of this book:
Our main girl, Addie, doesn’t want to get married or have children (bitch, mood) but alas she was born in the 1700s so she doesn’t have many choices in that department so she made a deal with the devil to basically be able to live in her own terms, unbothered by anyone else. The devil, being… the devil, twisted and turned her words into this curse that makes her live for a long time and makes her become this person who you’d immediately forget once you get your eyes off of her, making it practically impossible to make root or create any sort of life whatsoever. Every year the devil visits her, Addie talks about his dark curls and impossibly beautiful green eyes and how he is made of shadow, the devil asks her “are u done?” because he wants to take her soul and probably eat it up, but every year, despite living a terrible life, Addie says “fuck you, dude. no. now leave me” and that basically goes on for 300 years until she meets Henry, who impossibly, remembers her, and then they start going out together almost immediately, and later on we find out that Henry also made the deal with the same devil, that he wants to be loved and somehow both of their curses cancel each other out.

I rated this book 3 out 5 because although I found the premise to be interesting and not like anything i’ve ever heard before, but the application i found lacking, especially in characters development and the relationships of each characters. Addie, despite being hell-bent on being alive, doesn’t actually do much. She does the same thing over and over again and it makes such a boring and repetitive story because at the end of the day, the story itself relies so heavily on the romance and Addie’s romantic relationships with all of these different people. I find her character lacking in depth, i don’t think that she’s interesting or developed at all throughout the years. The Addie LaRue from 1700s is easily still the Addie LaRue from 2014, unchanged, despite years and years of being alive. There’s not many stakes in the story itself, the author touched upon the topic of losing one’s mind over the years, but did not really show us how that happen. I think that losing your mind or the depression and the misery of living such a difficult and long life should be highlighted upon, i think it deserves at least one chapter so that we can understand Addie better and how she spent the years of her life and it can help us to be more attached to the character better, because it’s tragedy and what else can make us get more attached to a character than that. The author also just touched upon the topic of war and sex work in the 1700s and 1900s but sometimes she always conveniently being transported to different country by Luc so we don’t get to see how she deals with those difficult situations at all. Case in point when she got herself imprisoned and Luc showed up and saved her, which in my opinion is so out of character. He wants her to suffer and give her soul up, but at the end of the day, whenever she 'suffers' too much, he shows up and gets Addie out of that situation.

I could imagine different ways to approach this concept that might be more interesting, we could see Addie’s way to interact with modern technology, we could see how she spends her days in the 90′s or 70′s at the dawn of a new age, but instead of that, we just flip flop between the 1700s up until the early 1900s to 2014, and i can imagine that it might be hard to write those things especially since this book covers about 300 years and it might get too dense, but i also think that the author could've done it, but she didn’t and instead she gives us this really brief, basically choppy narrative of how Addie spends her days and it’s not interesting to read at all. I genuinely wouldn’t mind if this book becomes a huge 1000 pages character study monster if the author decide to develop her personality more instead of giving us… whatever this thing this book is. I can imagine how interesting it is if addie interacts with the modern tech and does some detective work on luc, although i don’t know if that would be possible or not, but in my imagination it would be cool as heck.

The relationships in the book also feels… weird and too insta-lovey for me. We have Luc and Henry who basically look the same, and it’s all based on this person that Addie used to draw before she made the deal because it’s her “dream” guy or whatever, and I find it.. weird? there’s no explanation about that at all, was it all just some a convenient coincidence? we don’t know.

And lastly, I didn’t really like the ending of this because it was an open ending type of book, she ends up with Luc and Henry just goes on living his life after publishing a book about Addie. Did he even try to find her? what happens to him now? it’s unclear.

All in all, i think that this book has a promising concept, but the author didn’t go deep enough and it turns out to be a 400 pages of ‘i learned nothing from this’ and it’s just filled with romance and repetitive, depressing cycles i did not care for. The one good redeeming point about is the way the author writes about the setting and sometimes i feel like it’s atmospheric and vivid and it helps to transport the readers to the setting the characters are in. But other than that, the book just fell flat imo.