What do you do with a book that's clearly not written for you - but still manages to get under your skin?
I was up past midnight cleaning my Sig P365 at the kitchen table, Ranger snoring at my feet, and I'd queued this up mostly because I'd burned through my thriller backlog. Dutch-language YA fantasy about a mute orphan girl and a shadow world? Not exactly my usual ops tempo. But Schwab's name kept popping up in recommendations alongside books I actually liked, so I figured eight hours wasn't much of a commitment.
A Mute Protagonist in an Audio Format - Bold Move
Here's the thing that got me thinking. Olivia can't speak. She communicates through gestures, through her mother's journal, through sheer stubbornness. And you're listening to this as an audiobook. That's a weird tension, right? Lotte Horlings has to voice a character defined by silence, and she handles it by leaning into Olivia's internal world - her observations, her frustration, the way she processes the ghuls and shadows nobody else can see. Horlings has a clean, warm voice that suits the YA tone. Nothing flashy, no theatrical vocal gymnastics, but steady and clear. I bumped it to 1.25x as usual and it held up fine.
Where the narration doesn't quite land for me is character differentiation. When you've got Olivia's uncle, the household staff, and whatever dark entity lives on the other side of that wall, I needed more vocal contrast. Horlings keeps things in a relatively narrow register. For a cozy bedtime listen that's fine. For an old soldier who's used to full-cast productions with distinct voices for every operator on the team - it left me wanting.
The Shadow World Schwab Built (And Then Left Too Soon)
The setup is genuinely good. Orphan girl, dead mother's cryptic journal, a crumbling family estate called Gallant that sits right on the border between our world and a decaying shadow version of it. The concept of this dark mirror-world where everything is ash and bone - that's the kind of world-building that hooks me. Schwab paints that shadow side with real economy. You feel the wrongness of it.
But here's where it lost me. The book clocks in at just over eight hours, and the back half moves at double-time. You spend all this careful time building atmosphere, getting to know the house and its secrets, reading the mother's increasingly desperate journal entries - and then the confrontation with the dark entity on the other side happens so fast I had to rewind to make sure I hadn't missed something. The denouement wraps up in what felt like fifteen minutes. It's like planning a six-month campaign and then being told to execute in a weekend. The pacing just doesn't match the promise.
I've seen plenty of folks online say this reads more like middle grade than YA, and I get that criticism. The emotional stakes are real - a girl searching for family, for belonging, for her own voice (literally) - but the resolution comes too easy. No real cost. In my experience, the missions that matter always cost something. The Ballad of Never After is one that actually made me pay that cost - the ending earned what it asked for.
Who's This Op Actually For?
If you're a Schwab fan coming from Addie LaRue expecting that same gut-punch complexity, recalibrate. This is a smaller, quieter story. More fairy tale than epic. Linda would probably love it - she's got a shelf full of gothic-adjacent fiction and she'd eat up the creepy manor aesthetic.
The Dutch narration by Horlings is solid entry-level audiobook material. If you're new to the format or looking for something to wind down with, it works. If you need your narrator to be a full theater company, this isn't that.
And look - I didn't hate this. Parts of it genuinely surprised me. The mother's journal entries hit harder than I expected. There's something about reading a parent's desperate attempt to protect a child they'll never see grow up that doesn't require a fantasy setting to land. That's just human. Schwab understood that much.
Ranger's Sleeping Through the Debrief
Worth your time? Here's the debrief. Gallant is a well-built little gothic fantasy that pulls its punches right when it should be swinging hardest. Beautiful atmosphere, a protagonist you root for despite - or because of - her silence, and a shadow world concept that deserved twice the page count it got. Horlings does reliable work behind the mic. But at eight hours with that rushed ending, I'd say stream it rather than spend a credit. Save your credits for something that finishes as strong as it starts.
