Gallant by V. E. Schwab

Amy  

young adult, fantasy

Twelve-year-old Olivia is nonverbal and has been raised in an orphanage. She has no knowledge of her family except for her prized possession—her mother’s journal. One day, the head matron presents a letter in which her uncle has sent for her. She arrives at Gallant, her family home, to discover that the uncle died a year earlier and the house residents had no idea she existed or would be arriving. But the house and its many mysteries call to her. Something is definitely strange about her family and Gallant.

What a fabulously atmospheric story.  The visualizations painted by V. E. Schwab with her words are perfectly imagined. There are echoes of other orphan novels but Gallant was its own story. It is also very different from the other Schwab novels I’ve read—they are all different from each other, really. I found it to be creative and compelling overall.

However, while I enjoyed the story, by the halfway point, the pacing was slower than I like. Since Olivia is nonverbal, there isn’t much dialogue and the narration sometimes lacked momentum.  It’s hard for me to define why I fell out of love with it during the second half. It’s not that the author wrote anything unimportant or draggy, it’s just that the energy sort of deflated despite the fact that Olivia was in the midst of a mysterious, beautiful, new world to discover. I liked the novel. I just didn’t like it as much as any of her other novels.

Maybe I was frustrated with the many questions for which there were very few answers until late in the novel. Maybe I was let down once we had an inkling about the designs of Gallant’s universe because it wasn’t really believable. The closer the novel came to an end the more my buy-in waned. I decided this was supposed to be metaphoric. I felt a religious undertone with the family name being Prior and the aspect of keeping the darkness and destruction at bay. There were ghouls (angels and demons?). But the characters and their activities were definitely not religious. So my conclusion was that it’s more about the battle of good vs. evil and the fact that the battle is everlasting. There were some questions I wish had been addressed. Why is the house called Gallant? (Maybe because the residents are brave?) Why does Edgar know sign language? (Is there a history of nonverbal Priors?) Alas, I will never know. I am left very appreciative of the author’s creativity and characters but can’t commit to declaring that I loved this novel even though I really wanted to.

The narrator, Julian Rhind-Tutt, was a terrific voice actor. Originally, I questioned why a man was selected to narrate a story about a girl. He did not have a particularly great female voice, let alone multiple female voices. But, by the time it was over, most characters who spoke in the novel were men so I guess that is why. I enjoyed listening to his lovely accent and acting so I’ll give him an A-.