I have really loved various Olivie Blake books, so you know I had the highest hopes with Gifted & Talented. While there were various pieces that spoke to me, I didn’t fall as heads over heels as I expected. Keep reading this book review of Gifted & Talented for my full thoughts.
Summary
Where there’s a will, there’s a war.
Thayer Wren, the brilliant CEO of Wrenfare Magitech and so-called father of modern technology, is dead. Any one of his three telepathically and electrokinetically gifted children would be a plausible inheritor to the Wrenfare throne.
Or at least, so they like to think.
Meredith, textbook accomplished eldest daughter and the head of her own groundbreaking biotech company, has recently cured mental illness. You’re welcome! If only her father’s fortune wasn’t her last hope for keeping her journalist ex-boyfriend from exposing what she really is: a total fraud.
Arthur, second-youngest congressman in history, fights the good fight every day of his life. And yet, his wife might be leaving him, and he’s losing his re-election campaign. But his dead father’s approval in the form of a seat on the Wrenfare throne might just turn his sinking ship around.
Eilidh, once the world’s most famous ballerina, has spent the last five years as a run-of-the-mill marketing executive at her father’s company after a life-altering injury put an end to her prodigious career. She might be lacking in accolades compared to her siblings, but if her father left her everything, it would finally validate her worth—by confirming she’d been his favorite all along.
On the pipeline of gifted kid to clinically depressed adult, nobody wins—but which Wren will come out on top?
Review
(Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher. This has not impacted my review which is unbiased and honest.)
At various points in Gifted & Talented, I fell in and out of love. Throughout Gifted & Talented is a story about family. It’s a family drama about sibling rivalries and the complex feelings of a person after their death. Do we only remember their success? Or is a better picture of them also representative of their mistakes, the conversations we wish we had, and the people we wished they were? Family is full of expectations. And the hard reality is that the person we are with them is different than the person we are with our partners, our siblings, ourselves.
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Gifted & Talented has the trademark Olivie Blake touch with the tingles of magic and impossibility. But the actual magic piece of the book takes a side seat to the family dynamics. Gifted & Talented manages to bridge the gap between a slice of life story – in the sense that we really dig into each moment – and being an action packed story about loss. For each of these characters there are various moments of action, stillness, and introspection. If you have a sibling, this is going to be a must read for you.
There’s this build up while also being grounded in these every day slights from our siblings. By the end, as Gifted & Talented was hitting its stride, I fell back in love with it. At the beginning, I was a little lost about where the story was going, but I decided to just sit back and enjoy the messy family. If you love the feelings of the family moments and action of The Umbrella Academy, this is going to feel familiar to you. Find Gifted & Talented on Goodreads, Storygraph, Amazon, Bookshop.org, Blackwells, & Libro. fm.