Sofia's Reviews > Gallant

Olivia Prior can see ghosts, shadows of the long-dead: a bony hand here, a half-formed face there. She carries her mother’s last written words with her: stay away from Gallant, her family’s manor. But when she’s given a chance to escape the bleak gray walls of her boarding school, she takes it. However, Gallant is hiding something even darker than the ghouls she sees around her, and Olivia is determined to solve this mystery.

Gallant left me feeling unsatisfied and indifferent. This book somehow managed to affect me in absolutely no noticeable way. I’m surprised by how detached I felt while reading this.

The relationships among the characters were very surface-level. Hannah and Edgar only existed to help Olivia. Matthew changed as the book went along, but not in a way that felt organic. He switched from being hostile to treasuring Olivia more than anyone else, and did so across the span of a few days. They didn’t even spend that much time together. I get that he was distant because he wanted to protect her, but the change was so abrupt that it felt shallow.

Even the ghouls didn’t have much of a purpose. They just… drifted around and occasionally acted protective of Olivia. I kept waiting for a twist that would tie everything together, but there was nothing. What you see in the synopsis is it. Gallant doesn’t feel complete. My original opinions of each character never changed because nothing happened that would make them change. It was so unsatisfying.

Everything seems so arbitrary and disconnected. There are rules about the Priors, rules about the wall (which is a strangely short wall, by the way—I’m still not sure what the purpose of a door is if you can just walk around the wall)... I don’t know why it has to be this way. I don’t know how the Prior ancestors fought what’s beyond the wall. It seems cheap never to give explicit reasons for why things are the way they are.

This may be personal preference, but nothing was creepy enough. Gallant was basically a regular house. The staff weren’t suspicious at all. Not even Matthew felt threatening, and he was supposed to be. Even the literal embodiment of Death didn’t feel creepy. What does this book want to be? A Gothic thriller? Because I’m not feeling that. It had the elements of classic Gothic-style fiction (my love!): a haunted house, a precocious child, mysterious paranormal activity, a dead parent’s journal… But they didn’t fit together somehow. The atmosphere was almost there, but I didn’t feel invested in any part of the book. The house wasn’t foreboding enough. The hints weren’t strong enough to actually form some meaningful connection by the end. The final confrontation was very underwhelming. I kept waiting for everything to come together, but the stakes felt incredibly low.

The writing was beautiful, though. So haunting and delicate and vivid. If only the quality of the content matched the quality of the prose.

1.5 stars