The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

It is the blankness of the paper that excites her, the idea that she might fill the space with anything she likes.

She can speak German, Italian, Spanish, but French is different, French is bread baking in her mother’s oven, French is her father’s hands carving wood, French is Estele murmuring to her garden.

Day breaks like an egg yolk, spilling yellow light across the field.

No, Adeline has decided she would rather be a tree, like Estele. If she must grow roots, she would rather be left to flourish wild instead of pruned, would rather stand alone, allowed to grow beneath the open sky. Better that than firewood, cut down just to burn in someone else’s hearth.

Ideas are wilder than memories.

It is the kind of place that takes years to visit, and still there always seems to be another alley, another set of steps, another door.

Adeline is sixteen now, and everyone speaks of her as if she is a summer bloom, something to be plucked, and propped within a vase, intended only to flower and then to rot.

At home he is a quiet man, committed to his work, but on the road he begins to open, to unfold, to speak.

Choosing a class became choosing a discipline, and choosing a discipline became choosing a career, and choosing a career became choosing a life, and how was anyone supposed to do that, when you only had one?