For people who liked The Time Traveller's Wife or The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, or any of those popular variations on the Faust or Orlando stories, we have The Invisible Life of Addie La Rue. Born in a small village in France in the C18th, Adeline La Rue is different. Of course she's conventionally beautiful - we can't have a romantic heroine being anything but, right? - but she's different. She doesn't want to get married, she just wants to wander aroud wistfully and draw and hang out with the village witch, who teaches her about the old gods and how to communicate with them. And of course she warns Adeline never to call to the gods of the darkness. She makes that very clear. So you know what's going to happen. Upon finding out her parents are going to make her marry a palid older widower with two small children, she flees the evening wedding and rushes off into the woods, not noticing the time and calls for help. Help turns out to be a dark presence which takes the form of the dark curly-haired green-eyed fantasy man she's imagined since she was a child. And he offers her a deal: she can be free forever but no-one will ever remember her, and when she has had enough of this, it will take her soul. She can't age, she can't really be injured, she doesn't need to eat, but she still feels the pain of all of these things, but as soon as she is out of the sight of any person, they completely forget her. And she can't make a record of her existence in any way: if she writes, it fades away in front of her, and photographs as she finds out much later, record her as a blur. 

After a very rough few years, gradually she learns to make the best of this life, and even make an impression on artists in particular - did I mention she was beautiful? - who can record her even if they don't remember who she was afterwards and can't put a name to the beauty they have drawn or painted or sculpted. She travels Europe and then further afield, surviving revolutions and wars, before finally ending up in New York in the 2000s. And this is where the book falls apart. Up until this point the book has been sweeping and melodramatic in the best way, cutting through history and very well-written. But in New York, the book is overtaken by a group of frankly very dull and self-involved vapid hipsters, who it's hard to imagine a 300-year old woman being interested in, let along falling in love with one, even if he is the only man she has ever met who can remember her. And here the language of the book starts to purple out of control and the romantic clichés start to get tiresome. By far the best bits of the book at this stage remain Addie's deeper, longer-term love-hate (but really just hate) relationship with Luc, the ever-changing, evil, green-eyed spirit of the woodland dark who trapped her all those years ago and remains unable to stay away from her for more than a couple of decades, always trying to get her to give up her soul, but seemingly also obsessed with her.

Lots of people love this book, they seem almost in ecstasy about it. And to be fair there's a lot to love. But the flaws are large and annoying, and they have nothing to do with the type of book or the genre, they are just about the choices the author makes and the failure of the New York sections and the weak New York characters to stand up in comparison to the rest. Schwab tries very hard and fails, ultimately, to make me love New York. Frankly, there's enough New Yorkers out there who won't shut up about how great New York is. I want to read something different about the city, or just about a different city.