The real curse isn’t magic; it’s the crushing weight of your own unrealised potential.
Olivie Blake’s Gifted & Talented takes the dysfunctional family saga and injects it with a dose of magical realism, corporate backstabbing, and the specific kind of melancholy that haunts former child prodigies. The novel follows the three Wren siblings, Meredith, Arthur, and Eilidh, as they gather after the death of their tech-mogul father. It’s a story about the long tail of parental expectations, the absurdity of inherited wealth, and what happens when the magic you possess is more of a burden than a gift. If you enjoy sharp, witty prose and complicated sibling rivalries, this is a strong contender for your reading list.
Olivie Blake’s Gifted & Talented Review: A Magical Succession Story
“Olivie Blake’s Gifted & Talented is a sharp, slow-burn family saga where magical realism meets corporate backstabbing. If you love messy siblings, sharp satire, and the haunting weight of unrealised potential, this one hits.”
Maybe it’s the way they hold a grudge, or the way they remember which parent actually showed up to the recital. Siblings have their own specific brand of history, a shared language of slights and inside jokes that no amount of therapy can fully translate. Olivie Blake understands this intimately. Her latest novel, Gifted & Talented, doesn’t just acknowledge this dynamic; it weaponises it, turning a family of three wildly successful, deeply miserable people loose on each other in an exercise in literary chaos.
On the surface, this is a Succession-style corporate drama with a fantasy veneer. Thayer Wren, the father, built a magitech empire. His children, each possessing a unique and mostly unhelpful supernatural ability, are circling his estate like vultures waiting for the will to be read. Meredith, the eldest, runs a biotech firm built on a fraudulent mental health chip. Arthur, the middle child, is a congressman with a complicated polyamorous life and a habit of dying and resurrecting.
Eilidh, the youngest and arguably the most volatile, is a former ballerina who now works a quiet marketing job, largely to suppress the literal apocalyptic demon living inside her. If you strip away the corporate jargon and the magical abilities, you’re left with three people fighting for the last scrap of approval from a dead man.
Reading Blake’s prose here feels a lot like eavesdropping on a very clever, very mean cocktail party where you aren’t sure if you want to join the conversation or run away. Her sentences are long, winding things, filled with sharp observations that cut the characters down to size. Then she’ll follow one of those winding sentences with a fragment. Three words. A gut punch. It keeps you off balance, which is exactly where you need to be to appreciate the satire.
The critical consensus, if you squint at the reviews, is a fascinating split. Some readers bounced off this one hard. They point to the pacing, which is indeed glacial if you’re looking for a plot. Blake spends an inordinate amount of time in the characters’ heads, replaying childhood grievances, describing the feel of expensive sheets, or cataloguing the minutiae of a political campaign. Others found the characters insufferable. And they are. Meredith is a fraud, Arthur is a people-pleaser who hates people, and Eilidh is a walking natural disaster. They are all, by the narrator’s own admission, assholes.
But here’s the thing: they’re meant to be. The story is told through an omniscient narrator who eventually reveals themselves to be a specific character, a decision that adds a layer of metafiction I didn’t know I wanted. This narrator is cynical, weary, and has her own complicated history with the Wren family. Her voice is the secret sauce. She describes the siblings with a fond exasperation that softens their edges without excusing their behaviour. When the narrator finally steps into the light, it re-contextualises everything you’ve read, turning what felt like a sprawling family drama into something more intimate and tender.
This is Blake’s real strength as a writer, and it’s where I see the most growth from her earlier work. The Atlas Six was built on grand ideas and philosophical debates. Gifted & Talented is built on emotional truths. She’s less interested in the mechanics of the magic system, which remains frustratingly vague, a point of contention for many, and more interested in what that magic represents. Arthur can manipulate electricity, but he can’t fix his marriage. Eilidh can cause earthquakes, but she can’t undo her career-ending injury. The powers aren’t solutions; they’re just louder versions of the problems they already have.
I kept thinking about R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface while reading this. Both books operate in a similar satirical register, skewering the pretensions of the creative and professional elite. They share a willingness to let their protagonists be ugly, petty, and wrong. But where Kuang’s novel is a pressure cooker, Blake’s is a slow burn. It asks you to sit in the discomfort of these lives for a long time, to really marinate in the fact that being rich, powerful, and magical doesn’t make you happy. It just makes your unhappiness more dramatic.
If you want a book that looks at the wreckage of a family and doesn’t look away, a book that trusts you to sit with the discomfort of not liking the people you’re rooting for, then this one hits. It’s a reminder that the pipeline from gifted kid to depressed adult isn’t a failure of the individual; it’s a feature of a system that values what you produce over who you are.
And isn’t that the real curse?
Gifted & Talented by Olivie Blake
Where there’s a will, there’s a war.
From Olivie Blake, the New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six, magical realism meets Succession in Gifted & Talented.
Thayer Wren, brilliant CEO of Wrenfare Magitech, is dead. As the ‘father of modern technology’, he leaves an incredible legacy. But which of his three telepathically and electrokinetically gifted children is to inherit the Wrenfare throne?
Meredith, head of her own profitable company, is lauded for practically curing mental illness. If only her journalist ex-boyfriend wasn’t set on exposing her for what she really is: a total fraud. Arthur, second-youngest congressman ever, wants to do everything right. Except he’s losing his re-election campaign and his wife might be leaving him. Heading Wrenfare could relaunch his sinking ship. Eilidh was a world-famous ballerina until a life-altering injury ended her dancing career. Gaining the company might finally validate her worth.
On the pipeline of gifted-kid-to-clinically-depressed-adult, nobody wins. Yet, as they gather to read Thayer’s final words, which Wren will come out on top?
Gifted & Talented is a compulsive story of family, twisted love and dangerous secrets from a writer at the peak of her powers.
* * *
‘Addictively entertaining, this is Blake at the height of her abilities’
– Ava Reid, no. 1 New York Times bestselling author of Lady Macbeth
‘Olivie Blake’s singular narrative voice sparkles’
– M. L. Rio, bestselling author of If We Were Villains
‘Incisive, unsparing and utterly brilliant’
– Chloe Gong, New York Times bestselling author of Immortal Longings
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