Gallant, by V.E. Schwab. Greenwillow Books, 2022

 

Fourteen year old orphan Olivia has never known a home other than Merilance, an orphanage. She is non-verbal, and is bullied and shunned. That’s all right with her; she prefers to be alone, anyway. Her only possession, other than the gray dresses the orphanage provides, is her mother’s old journal, a green notebook with a “G” on the cover. She’s got that book memorized, even though most of it makes no sense to her.

She’s about to age out of the orphanage and be sent somewhere to be a scullery maid or the like, when a letter arrives from her uncle, inviting her to come home to Gallant. And so, off she goes. She cannot remember ever having been off the premises of Merilance, so the trip by hired car is exciting. Her reception, however, is exciting in a less than good way: no one was expecting her, she has no living uncle, the estate is home to only three people-her cousin, the housekeeper, and the groundskeeper- and that cousin tells her to get out. Obviously, she does not heed this advice/order.

Olivia has always been able to see ghosts- she calls them ‘ghouls’- so the fact that the house is full of them doesn’t bother her. They are, though, quite a bit more solid seeming than the ones at Merilance. But that’s not the oddest thing about the place; at the foot of the garden, on the other side of a rock wall, stands another Gallant. It’s almost a mirror image, but the inhabitants are very different. Between both these Gallants, she may be able to figure out her family history; why she is an orphan; and why she is being told to flee.

I enjoyed the book; I stayed up one night with it. But, it’s not solid five star. The writing itself is exquisite, and it leads one on and on. But the plot is thin, and characters other than Olivia are pretty shallow, too. You’d think that, with so few characters, they would have a chance to be fleshed out. Sadly, no. Hannah and Edgar, the staff, are shadowy figures of goodness. Matthew, her cousin, is volatile and storms around and changes his mind rapidly and confusingly. (I’d have things to say about others, but it would be too spoiler-y.) So even though I loved the book on some levels, (and will look at what else the author has written) I can only assign it four stars.