Gallant by V E Schwab

I would like to thank Titan for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Titan

Published – Out Now

Price – £17.99 hardback £4.68 Kindle eBook

Fourteen-year-old Olivia Prior is missing three things: a mother, a father, and a voice. Her mother vanished all at once, and her father by degrees, and her voice was a thing she never had to start with. She grew up at Merilance School for Girls. Now, nearing the end of her time there, Olivia receives a letter from an uncle she's never met, her father's older brother, summoning her to his estate, a place called Gallant. But when she arrives, she discovers that the letter she received was several years old. Her uncle is dead. The estate is empty, save for the servants. Olivia is permitted to remain, but must follow two rules: don't go out after dusk, and always stay on the right side of a wall that runs along the estate’s western edge. Beyond it is another realm, ancient and magical, which calls to Olivia through her blood…

A lot of fantasy is about the boundaries between worlds. The ‘real’ and the supernatural; the living and the dead or magic versus science. This is something humans have done for millennia – be it in the form of religion, folklore, or stories. Our desire to explain our world, to answer the unknowable about what happens when we die or just to imagine there is more to life than what we see every day. In V E Schwab’s novel Gallant we get a tale of two worlds but not one I felt ever really pushed the boundaries of those questions despite an intriguing lead character.

Olivia Prior is sixteen and has stayed most of her life alone at Merilance School for Girls dreaming of escape. As a woman who is mute; and she has been a target of bullying and ignorance from both pupils and teachers often requiring her to fight back. She knows little of where she came from bar her mother’s strange journal which she reads constantly. Just as Olivia plans to prepare for finding a role in the outer world she is requested by her Uncle in writing to come to Gallant the family home of her mother. But there she finds her Uncle has been dead already for two years and that Matthew the sole remaining owner of the home clearly doesn’t want her here and Olivia notes there is a wall with a door that is fiercely locked. Olivia sees ghosts and starts to realise the secret of her family is going to have to be finally revealed to her.

This was an unusual reading experience for me. I really enjoy Schwab’s work but didn’t quite click with this in my usual fashion despite it sharing many of the characteristics of Schwab’s work that pulls me in. There are also some really interesting ideas being attempted. Olivia is a mute character so we have a book with a challenge of a character who does not have conversations as we are used to reading and so writing and sign language are the best forms of communication. Schwab does a great job of showing intolerance by particularly those at school never bothering to learn sign language and instead force Olivia to talk only through writing. When she finally meets characters who can understand her conversations move quicker and have far more emotional depth to them than hastily written messages. A really interesting approach to a character and one that reminds many readers of their own attitudes and privileges.

The school scenes help a lot at the start of the novel to make us understand the spiky Olivia and her unhappiness and desire to know who she is. This also puts the first glimpse of the supernatural themes in the story as we see Olivia uniquely sees ghosts often quite disfigured ghosts and that is very normal. When we reach Gallant though while there are lots of interesting moments and ideas none of them though I felt really glued the story together. We see Gallant is on a boundary with a world of the dead and there is a dark reflection of Gallant owned by a sinister powerful force who wants our world, but this is where I felt the story felt like it went a little off course for me. There are some lovely scenes created – a dance of corpses; a world of little colour and the other world has a sense of unnerving dark magic btu it really didn’t at novel length fill in this world. The magical force of death is in our world so why does it need containing? What really happened to Olivia’s parents and how did she survive. At novella length this story could have been tighter, and I’d not have so many questions but at circa 300 pages I felt it had quite a few gaps that despite enjoying it I felt I needed more answers about what happened next.

Gallant is an enjoyable ride into a magical folklore and fans of Schwab’s work will recognise the recurring themes of boundaries being crossed, atmospheric dark magic and leading characters who are not the standard template of a heroine but for me this tale didn’t quite feel complete enough to work properly. Fun but may not linger long in the memory.