Addie LaRue is the book r/Fantasy and r/books recommend when someone wants something atmospheric and a little melancholy. In 1714 France, Adeline makes a desperate deal with a dark god to live forever, and the curse is that no one she meets will remember her. For 300 years she leaves no mark on anyone, until a young man named Henry, in a bookshop, says 'I remember you.' Readers are split on the ending: it's emotionally earned but light on plot resolution, and going in knowing it's a character-and-mood novel rather than a plot novel saves a lot of disappointment. Lush, lonely, and beautifully written, a slow-burn literary fantasy, not an action one.
Curated from real reader threads on Reddit (r/Romantasy, r/RomanceBooks, r/Fantasy) and cross-referenced against Goodreads and BookTok. Updated regularly.
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by Matt Haig
The most-mentioned Addie LaRue readalike in Reddit threads, 6 of 20. Both ask the same question: what does a life mean? Different mechanisms (library vs. immortality curse), same emotional weight.
by Erin Morgenstern
Two magicians bound by a competition they didn't choose fall in love inside a black-and-white circus that exists outside normal time. The atmospheric fantasy most closely aligned with Addie LaRue's prose and feeling.
by Erin Morgenstern
A graduate student finds a book containing a story about his own life and follows it underground to a hidden library city. Same lush prose, same sense of time and story as living fabric.
by Madeline Miller
Circe, daughter of the sun god Helios, discovers her gift as a witch, and spends centuries navigating gods, monsters, and mortals in a world that would prefer she didn't exist. Same woman-across-time epic structure as Addie LaRue, same luminous prose, same sense of a life accumulating meaning against a mythological backdrop.
by Laini Taylor
Lazlo Strange, a dreamer of a librarian obsessed with a mythical lost city, gets his impossible chance when a band of godkiller warriors shows up looking for someone exactly like him. Lush fairy-tale prose, mythology invented whole-cloth, a love story between two people from impossible worlds.
by Anthony Doerr
A blind French girl and a German boy during WWII, told in braided timelines. Same sweeping-through-history emotional register and luminous sentence-level writing.
Reddit is split. Most readers find it emotionally earned but low on plot resolution. Schwab wrote it as an ending about meaning rather than victory. Going in knowing it's a character novel rather than a plot novel helps.
Different audiences. The Shades of Magic trilogy is her most-recommended fantasy for plot-driven readers. Addie LaRue is her most-recommended for literary-leaning readers. The Villains duet (Vicious/Vengeful) is her darkest work.
No announced sequel as of 2025. Schwab has said Addie's story is complete. The ending is written to work as a standalone. Most readers feel adding a sequel would undermine what the ending does.
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