Gifted & Talented by Olivie Blake is a 512 page standalone novel published in 2025 by Tor Books.

Genre:

Contemporary Fantasy

Synopsis:

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six comes the story of three siblings who, upon the death of their father, are forced to reckon with their long-festering rivalries, dangerous abilities, and the crushing weight of all their unrealized adolescent potential.

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?

Opening Line:

Meredith Wren, a fucking asshole, not that it matters at this stage of the narrative but it’s worth pointing out, sat blinded by the overhead lights from the stage, squinting unflatteringly into the brand-new, state-of-the-art auditorium that had just been completed on Tycho’s unethically verdant campus.

My Thoughts:

I guess I felt sorry for them, the Wrens. Which you shouldn’t do. Lord knows they don’t need your sympathy. If you give a mouse a cookie…you know how that turns out.

But hey, a bad dad is a bad dad.

The Wren siblings each have their own curious magical ability, as well as their individual contentious familial relationships. Having been raised with every resource available to the wealthy and respected, you would think they would naturally have had a step up to reaching the heights of success themselves. And yet…

He had simply believed, in his heart or possibly somewhere even dumber, that she could do anything…

This book tells the story of what happens when their father dies and they gather for his funeral and the reading of his will. Each sibling comes with their own attendant companions as well – various spouses, exes, mistresses, etc. Some of the characters can be very irritating, and yet the writing and especially the narrative voice (utilizing a clever twist on the omniscient narrator) in this book are spectacular. I’ve seen this story described as “magical Succession“, and certain bits about the nabob family reminded me of Mike Flanagan’s television adaption of The Fall of the House of Usher.

“I didn’t want happiness, for fuck’s sake–I wanted an A!” She felt sick with herself, with the repulsion of having seen her insides. “I wanted to get a good grade in life, in adulthood, in existing–but who was ever going to give me that?

Through a fairly angsty process, Thayer Wren’s adult children are forced to face their own personal hang ups, the joys and disappointments they’ve been served within their family. The angst, some characters being pretty unlikable, and the lack of satisfying explanation as to why some people seem to have a singular specific magical ability prevented this from being a 5 star read for me, but the clever writing and amusing voice that had me letting out the occasional startled laugh brought it pretty close.

In this version of the story, [she] might rewrite her selfish behaviors and her narrow concern for the mere aesthetics of life in favor of seeking redemption and accountability, having been suitably visited by the ghosts of Christmas past and/or a mental health professional.