Review: Glow by Amy Kathleen Ryan

by Jewels E 8/22/2012 8 comments

Hello fellow book lovers,

After my brief visit into Calgary and the surrounding area, I'm back and ready to blog. Glow might be my last YA review for August, but I will continue to read and review YA periodically. Hope you enjoy the review! And, thanks to Esther at Macmillian Audio, I have an audio clip for you to listen to here. 

Summary

Paperback, 336 pages

Published July 17th 2012 by St. Martin's Griffin 

ISBN 1250007836 (ISBN13: 9781250007834)

(first published September 13th 2011)

If a violent battle destroyed the only world you’ve ever known, would you be brave enough to save who was left? Would love be strong enough to survive the fight? Either way, there’s no turning back…

The Empyrean is the only home 15-year-old Waverly has ever known. As members of the first generation to be successfully conceived in deep space, she and her boyfriend Kieran will be pioneers of New Earth. Waverly knows she must marry young in order to have children who can carry on the mission, and Kieran, the handsome captain-to-be, has everything Waverly could want in a husband. But there’s a part of Waverly that wants more from life than marriage… and she is secretly intrigued by the shy, darkly brilliant Seth.

Suddenly, Waverly’s dreams are interrupted by the inconceivable – a violent betrayal by the Empyrean's sister ship, the New Horizon. In one pivotal moment, Waverly and Kieran are separated, and find themselves at the helm of dangerous missions, where every move has potentially devastating consequences, and decisions of the heart may lead to disaster.

Pulse-pounding and addictive, Glow is the first novel in Amy Kathleen Ryan's riveting Sky Chasers series. Summary from www.goodreads.com 

Review
The premise of this story gripped me right away. Having grown up on sci fi, a love story set in space was too enticing to pass up. However, Glow didn't turn out to be quite the way I expected.

First off, it irritated me beyond reason that the crew of the Empyrean seemed so inept when they were boarded. It seemed like no one was following any emergency protocols or attending their stations, and while I understood that the boarding party had been unexpected and that everyone was worried about their children, I couldn't believe that no one thought to stop by a weapons locker so that they could defend their ship. It made me wonder if they'd even prepared for anything bad happening as they trekked their way across space to their New Earth. I literally had to put the book down at times because I was so frustrated. That being said, the plot was gripping. This book definitely had a lot of action and it's filled with betrayals and deceit, and you are left wondering about who's right and who's wrong in this book. There's a lot of grey area that way. The story was brilliantly told, even if at times I wanted to smack the main characters upside the head to knock some sense into them.

Which brings me to the characters:
Waverly: Kick ass all the way as far as I'm concerned. She sacrifices herself to try and keep the members of her crew--people that are her family and friends--safe, and once she's taken on to the New Horizon she fights tooth and nail to free herself and the other girls from grips of Anne Mather and the deluded members of the New Horizon crew. Her stubborn strength, and ability to remain in sight of what's true and what's not, despite all that grey matter, really won my respect.
Kieran: At first glance, Kieran seemed too young and inexperienced to be a leader, and certainly lacked the self confidence for the role. As the novel progressed, I admired his tenacity in resisting Seth's efforts to break him down, but overall I wouldn't trust Kieran as far as I could throw him. He's a zealot and I see him becoming really dangerous.
Seth: I was immediately attracted to this darker bad boy. But like Kieran, over the course of the novel, he changes, and he comes across as an out of control domineering bully. But then, right at the very end, he says something that makes me like him again: "I'm not a good person." In my reading experience, it's always the ones that think they are bad people that are really the heroes, so I have hope for Seth turning out to be really great.
Anne Mather: I have not loathed a character this much since Dolores Umbridge in the Harry Potter series.   Enough said there I think. The woman is contemptible.

Now, this novel also took my surprise because I thought there would be more of the love triangle played out between Waverly, Seth and Kieran, and there wasn't. I wasn't too disappointed however, because it allowed the characters to really become established in their own rights. It also allowed for a greater back story to become evident, even though we don't have all of the details yet about that story yet. I'm extremely curious to find out what Captain Jones was up to, and what sort of men he really had aboard the Empyrean. Anne Mather hinted that he was a dark, twisted sort of man, and Waverly herself has never felt comfortable with the way the men on the Empyrean look at her. I hope some of this back story becomes further developed in the next novel, because like I said, there's tons of grey area for Ryan to play around and I'm intrigued to see where the story takes us.

4 glittering stars