“Gifted & Talented” | A Thrilling Walk On A Character Tightrope

The Wren Siblings – Fragile As Birds

Gifted & Talented begins with the unexpected death of Thayer Wren, the brilliant but toxic billionaire founder and CEO of Wrenfare Magitech, a company responsible for modern technology. Thayer leaves behind his multi-trillion-dollar empire and his three adult children who possess latent telepathic, telekinetic, and electrokinetic abilities, and whose lives, as we learn, are spiraling out of control. The three Wren sibling characters are the three deeply flawed, hyper-competitive persons, each desperate for the corporate crown to validate their worth or save them from ruin. 

Meredith is the eldest daughter, a textbook overachiever and CEO of her own biotech company. She has achieved worldwide fame by inventing Chirp, a tech chip marketed on the premise that it cures mental illness. In reality though, Meredith is a fraud who has used her magical abilities to manipulate Chirp’s test results. When her ex-boyfriend, an investigative journalist, threatens to expose her fraud and corporate malfeasance, inheriting the Wren fortune becomes her only lifeline.

Arthur, the middle child, is the mascot, a natural people pleaser. He is the youngest congressman in U.S. history but is secretly entangled in a bisexual polyamorous relationship while his wife prepares to leave him. On the road to losing his re-election campaign, and suffering from a magical malady that disrupts his life, inheriting the company is the only way to turn his life around.

Eilidh, the youngest daughter, was once a world-famous prodigy ballerina whose career was ended by a spinal injury. She now works a mundane marketing job at Wrenfare. While she lacks the outward accolades and grandeur of her siblings, she was the only child who wasn’t estranged from their father. Inheriting the company would prove to her siblings that she was her father’s favorite. However, her telekinetic magic keeps accidentally triggering, and it possesses a dangerous, apocalyptic scale.

Family Conflicts

Legal complications delay the execution of Thayer’s will and our three main character siblings are forced to cohabitate in their childhood home. Rather than a fast-paced thriller, Gifted & Talented moves forward deliberately in an effortless read, ferociously focusing on internal dialogue and cynical wit. The siblings grapple with the ghosts and skeletons of their childhood, suffering the results of demanding parents, and the crushing weight of unrealized potential.

To resolve the inheritance deadlock and find relief from their fractured lives, they must confront their shared history and seek help from someone they once betrayed. Ultimately, Gifted & Talented is less about who wins the corporate crown and more about a dysfunctional family reckoning with capitalism, privilege, and what it actually means to find some measure of peace and perhaps even happiness outside of parental approval and a dysfunctional past.

A Tricky Tightrope Act

With Gifted & Talented, Blake navigates a tightrope, balancing character unlikeability with vulnerability. The Wren siblings are deeply flawed and toxic, even unlikeable, but Blake keeps you entirely invested in them. They become understandable, and your dislike is channeled into genuine empathy, care and fascination.

I’ve certainly experienced and can relate to the pressure of expectations that the Wren siblings experience, even if I’m not a multi-trillion-dollar heir. By framing their toxic traits as coping mechanisms, the novel provides context for their behavior. Meredith’s perpetration of fraud stems from her desperate fear of being ordinary; Arthur’s self-sabotage is the defense mechanism of a chronic people-pleaser who has sublimated his needs for others; and Eilidh’s bitterness is born from a stolen identity, how her dancing was abruptly ended by injury. Because we experience the wounds that created their toxicity and the emotional damage they struggle with, their unsavory actions become relatable rather than simply malicious.

The narrative juxtaposes the characters’ massive wealth and innate magical abilities with mundane and fragile (and familiar) human problems. While the Wren siblings may have the power to level a building or manipulate millions of dollars, they still lie awake at night agonizing over a text message, feeling inadequate, or drowning in loneliness. It’s familiar emotional territory. This juxtaposition humanizes them, and their almost god-like magical status makes the small, fragile moments of emotional desperation hit even harder.

The choice of an omniscient narrator is a brilliant framing device. The narrator doesn’t judge the characters by human moral standards. Instead, the narrator’s voice is a potent and entertaining mix of dry humor, cosmic irony, and a strange, detached tenderness. Because the narrator strips away the pretenses of corporate success and political power, the reader experiences the characters’ naked internal truths, and these vulnerabilities outweigh their external flaws.

Toxic characters can be exhausting victims when portrayed in isolation, in a doom-scroll existentialist type of way, but when the three Wren siblings are together in a room, the resulting chemistry is electric. Blake’s dialogue between the Wren siblings is razor-sharp, witty, and laden with the explosiveness of decades of shared conflict. They all know the buttons to push to hurt each other, but they also possess an intimate understanding of each other that no one else in the world shares. Experiencing them sniping at each other while occasionally displaying a fierce, involuntary protectiveness made them entirely engaging and, surprisingly, brought them closer to my heart because, as anyone with siblings will feel, their pain was familiar.

Likability Second, Engagement First

A character in a story or novel doesn’t need to be morally good to be likable, but they do need to be compelling, vulnerable, and damn it, they need to be highly competent at something (even if that something is self-destruction). Blake ensures that while we might not want to be friends with the three Wrens, we cannot turn away from them. We want them to find some measure of wholeness, and that desire is as urgent for us as it is for the characters. I read this book on a weekend, it flew by, fast and furious. The dialogue is at once acidic and pointed, and yet incredibly tender and forgiving.

Though at first I was cautious about such unsavory characters, soon I came to care a whole lot, not so much wanting one or the other to inherit the fortune, but hoping, at what seemed against all hopes, that they would find a measure of peace. In no time at all, I was in their corners, rooting, laughing, and coming to care about each of them. Blake’s Gifted & Talented walks this character tightrope and pulls it off beautifully in this thrilling and satisfying read.

~J.S. Hood