It made you want to urge Olivia to explore more so you the reader could learn more and more about these buildings and their occupants. The fact the book itself is also physically structured with excerpts and drawings from Olivia’s mother’s journal just adds to the immersive feeling of the two opposing Gallant’s that Schwab has built. Again Olivia having to communicate through drawing and her internal monologue we get a really deep sense of her world and what she is experiencing. Schwab is a powerhouse at worldbuilding but this just goes a step beyond. The plot is not overly complex most of it is given in the blurb and that is fine as the complexity comes in Olivia’s internal journey but also that of the worldbuilding. It just is a really beautiful development for a character and one of V.E Schwab’s strongest. I love the journey Olivia goes on and she learns more about her family, what they have gone through, what he mother was really like and what it is like to build a home for herself. How her behaviour and personality intertwines with how she interprets the only thing she believes she has left of her family, her mother’s journal, and how she uses that to guide her. This adds so many layers to her character, it speaks to her upbringing at the home for girls, her sense of abandonment, and how she built her defences against that. I felt that she read more like a 14-15 year old especially when it came down to her physical description, also in her behaviour, which can be viewed as cruel and juvenile. To me she did read younger than her 16 years of age. Her inability to speak and therefore her need to find other ways of expressing and communicating leading the internal frustration with others and herself sometimes was a really well structured ebb and flow through out the book.

While she does have the typical tenacity and stubbornness of a lot of Schwab’s characters I found Olivia to be a lot more relatable. They run very close to being Mary Sue’s and if they do have weaknesses they are easily forgotten or overcome. I enjoy V.E Schwab’s writing but I do find that in a lot of her books her characters, especially her female characters, can push the 'I’m not like other girls' line into caricatures a bit much.

I think, this might be my favourite V.E Schwab.

Gallant ve schwab release date