For me, Gallant was a surprise.  I’m not sure what I expected, maybe a book about a girl who fights, loves, and lives. And yes, Gallant has all of these, but not in the way I thought.
First of all, I love how dark this book is. Yes, we all know that V.E.Schwab loves to play with shadows, powers found in the dark, and alternative universes, but there is Light fighting the Dark, is a girl who doesn’t fit in the stereotype and some boy with supernatural powers. In Gallant, the dark is not beautiful, but horrible. And there is no hero. You can’t see what is waiting for you in the dark… unless you are a Prior. A family who are blessed and cursed at the same time.

In Gallant, your friendly phantoms are represented by ghouls, unmaterial things that are trapped in this world. The ghouls are monstruos, their bodies incompleted, rooted, and unseen by everyone, except a girl. By who will believe her even she could speak.

A really cute detail is the communication between Olivia’s parents. After I read The invisible life of Addie LaRue, I thought that the imagines for that book are beautiful and how the author used them was perfect. But the pictures in Gallant? And their signification? A masterpiece! I spent a lot of time trying to understand and see the story behind them, but I don’t really get how Olivia saw them just as something ugly before knowing the meaning.

I like how the fight between our world and the world of the death is illustrated, how these two places coexits and overlap sometimes. The history of Priors, how they fights, how they lost and the madness that comes after them, something like you can’t know the Death without him knowing you.