GALLANT is a strange little book. The best way I can describe it is "what if there was something a lot less pleasant behind the wall in The Secret Garden?"

There is such a sense of mystery and foreboding about the wall and the house and the family secrets. Olivia slowly ferrets them out. Each time you think you know what's going on and what will happen next, there's a subversion of expectations - particularly at the ending. I really liked the ending, the not-quite-settled-and-resolved feeling of it. It fits the tone of the book so well.

Also, non-verbal main character! I loved seeing that rep, someone who's interacting with body language and signing (with those who can sign.) The contrast between the school and then two of the people at Gallant really helped make Gallant feel more like a home, like a place Olivia wanted to fight for. There's also a dyslexic side character.

There are illustrations and diary entries throughout. We see all the images three times, and the diary extracts (formatted to look like pages) twice. It's very interestingly done, but does take until the chunk of dark-edged pages in the middle to work out the why of them.

At first the heavy ink drawings (it's hard to describe them - some of them look like ink blots at first, and then the longer you look, the more detail comes out) and journal extras feels randomly scattered between chapters, more a memory of her mother and not telling a consistent narrative.

And then comes the section in the middle (which due to formatting has black page edges - if you glance at the page edges, it's a very clear midpoint, something that you're wondering what it will be when it comes.) The journal extracts and illustrations come in order, right on the heels of a revelation about them. That's when their meaning clicks, when they tell a story of their own.

After that, the illustrations are used to reflect what's happening in the story, adding another layer of meaning to the images. It is honestly such a clever use of images.