Review: Gallant by V.E. Schwab

Author: V.E. Schwab
Edition: eARC
Publisher: Titan Books (March 8, 2022)
Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy

Synopsis

My review of Gallant

Gallant is a quietly haunted and compulsively readable novel that explores death, balance, and the power of belonging.

I received a free ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.

⚠ Content and trigger warnings for ableism & ableist language, parental abandonment, child abuse & neglect, nightmares, blood depiction, death, knife violence and bullying ⚠

Quiet Hauntings

Gallant took me by surprise. It’s a book filled with quiet hauntings and opposing truths. It’s slow and yet I devoured it incredibly quickly. Gallant is a book like smoke running through cupped hands: you can’t really grasp it if you try too hard. There’s a lesson about balance, the value of listening and the power of belonging somewhere in there, both obvious and hidden behind impossible walls.

Gallant is a book that asks you to accept two realities at once. Death is inevitable and Death can be banished. Life ends and life continues. Both its characters and the plot constantly move between those realities. Literally, when Olivia visits the two different versions of Gallant, and more figuratively in the language and visuals of the story. As someone who has been both haunted and comforted by death her entire life and often struggles to hold multiple truths at once, Gallant felt like the perfect book for me.

Schwab’s writing is lyrical and conjures ghouls and shadows with remarkable ease. It felt like the words were smoke, merely drifting around the outline of a story that had always been there. Reflecting back, I admire the way V.E. Schwab manages to tell the same story, that of Olivia’s parents, multiple times throughout the book. And each time the story is told, there is new information to be added, a new perspective. This way of playing with perception and the smokey nature of truth was the perfect in-story mirroring of the themes of the book.

Olivia, Olivia, Olivia

Unexpectedly, Olivia has joined my club of angry fictional girls I love. I didn’t expect her rage, her stubbornness, but it found me anyway. Olivia doesn’t speak. She moves through the world as a quiet but never silent participator. Schwab plants us firmly in Olivia’s perception of the world. We experience her thoughts but to me most notably we experience her physical existence. There is a weight to how she moves through the world, her body a silent scream of “I am here, don’t pretend you don’t see me!”

Something I can’t yet put into words but that stuck with me is Olivia’s and subsequently Gallant’s relationship to sound. It’s not a quiet book, really. But it does feel like stepping outside on a winter morning into a world muffled by the snow. I think what might be happening is that Gallant is a book of details, of small sounds, amplified. Either way, I loved it.

Overall…

Gallant is the kind of quietly haunted book that effortlessly nestled itself into the corner of my heart. I didn’t expect it to, but I welcome it in the shadows anyway. It’s a book I can’t quite grasp and maybe that’s the point.

This book is for you if…

…you like quiet books you can devour in one sitting
…you are looking for a book with a strong main character and soft horror vibes