Gallant by V. E. Schwab – 5 Star Book Review

Everything casts a shadow. Even the world we live in. And as with every shadow, there is a place where it must touch. A seam, where the shadow meets its source.

Gallant by V. E. Schwab is one of the two print ARCs I received from the HarperCollins Canada #FrenzyPresents winter 2022 catalogue preview event. Thank you for this beautiful ARC and the opportunity to read it early! I was also approved for an eARC, but since the illustrations play such an important roll in the storytelling in this book, I gladly chose the slower reading experience of reading the print book. My thoughts are my own and my review is honest.

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About the Book

Gallant
by V.E. Schwab
Illustrated by Manuel Sumberac

Publishing 1 March 2022
Greenwillow Books (HarperCollins)

Genre: YA Dark Fantasy
Page Count: 352
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Everything casts a shadow. Even the world we live in. And as with every shadow, there is a place where it must touch. A seam, where the shadow meets its source.

Olivia Prior has grown up in Merilance School for girls, and all she has of her past is her mother’s journal—which seems to unravel into madness. Then, a letter invites Olivia to come home—to Gallant. Yet when Olivia arrives, no one is expecting her. But Olivia is not about to leave the first place that feels like home, it doesn’t matter if her cousin Matthew is hostile or if she sees half-formed ghouls haunting the hallways.

Olivia knows that Gallant is hiding secrets, and she is determined to uncover them. When she crosses a ruined wall at just the right moment, Olivia finds herself in a place that is Gallant—but not. The manor is crumbling, the ghouls are solid, and a mysterious figure rules over all. Now Olivia sees what has unraveled generations of her family, and where her father may have come from.

Olivia has always wanted to belong somewhere, but will she take her place as a Prior, protecting our world against the Master of the House? Or will she take her place beside him?

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My Review

My Rating: 5 Stars
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Gallant by V. E. Schwab is one of the two print ARCs I received from the HarperCollins Canada #FrenzyPresents winter 2022 catalogue preview event. Thank you for this beautiful ARC and the opportunity to read it early! I was also approved for an eARC, but since the illustrations play such an important role in the storytelling in this book, I gladly chose the slower reading experience of reading the print book. My thoughts are my own and my review is honest.

I was drawn to this book for several reasons. I’ve had so many people recommend Schwab but I hadn’t read her work yet. I was impressed and intrigued by the presentation she gave at the #FrenzyPresents event in December 2021. The artwork on the cover (and throughout the book) is hauntingly beautiful in a soft and loose sort of watercolour style that I wish I did more of myself. On top of all of that, my maiden name is Galland, a German/French variation on the surname this book and its titular haunted house share. I don’t come across it often! How could I not pick up this book?

I’m so glad I did! Schwab writes with the same sort of eerily beautiful prose that has made Morgenstern, Gaiman, and Rothfuss (and now Schwab!) my favourites. I will absolutely be looking for every last Schwab title now to get caught up and eagerly await what’s next!

Gallant is a ghost story of sorts like none other I’ve ever read before. Olivia is an orphan living at a “school” (orphanage) called Merelance. She’s artistically gifted, she’s whip-smart, she’s completely mute, and she sees the silent ghouls who haunt this forsaken estate. The only thing she has left of her parents is her mothers’ journal, and it warns her never to return to Gallant. Unfortunately for Olivia, just as Merelance is done with her and ready to ship her off to a workhouse, a letter arrives from a long-lost uncle beckoning her back to Gallant. Should she go home to the family she didn’t know she still had? Should she heed her mother’s last warning and take her chances in the world at large? What sort of horrible mysteries await her if she goes where she knows she shouldn’t?

Everything about this book is beautiful, even if it’s haunting and sometimes gruesome. This is gothic horror meets urban fantasy of the paranormal/magical realism flavour, and it works so well. This is the sort of writing that inspires the poet inside me that wants to write novels and makes me dare to think it’s possible to write dark and complicated plots in the style of a Tennyson poem because that’s what this feels like.

I love how nearly every time something written or spoken is repeated it’s done in threes. “Olivia, Olivia, Olivia.” “Hold on. Hold on. Hold on.” “Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?” “Olivia, Olivia, Olivia.” It’s poetic, it’s powerful, and those lines flow a little faster than everything around it. They feel whispered. They have rhythm.

I agree with others who read ARCs that the synopsis on Goodreads pre-publication gives a little too much away. I hope that was reconsidered for the final printings. Since I heard Schwab talk about this book at the event I didn’t need to read a synopsis to know I wanted to read it, and the print ARCs only have the first paragraph, so I didn’t realize just how much the synopsis says. If you’re holding the physical book in your hands, there’s a stripe of darker pages almost in the middle where all of the illustrations are clustered together with key text to hammer home the secondary story we’ve been fed in bits and pieces up until that point and that’s about where the reader is supposed to figure out exactly how entangled Olivia is with Gallant. The pre-publication Goodreads synopsis suggests a spoiler that kills this reveal. I don’t think it would spoil the second half of the book at all, but I appreciated being able to come to a certain horrifying and fascinating conclusion as Olivia pieced it together herself.

I think that by now people are starting to realize that YA isn’t exclusively for teens and that older audiences can read and enjoy YA as well. With that said, I want to assure fellow older readers, there’s nothing juvenile about this book and it can absolutely be enjoyed at any age. The characters are in their mid-teens but it’s set in a different time when kids that age weren’t kids anymore, and if it weren’t for the few other characters referring to Olivia and Matthew AS kids, I wouldn’t have to remember their ages. I’m 34 and Olivia could be my peer.

If you like beautifully written gothic stories, read this one!

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