I had a feeling I was going to struggle with Glow from chapter one. There were issues with the writing style (which I’ll go into later) that were present from the beginning. However, I was hopeful that the plot, and character development would be enough to save the writing, and I’d still like it even if I didn’t Love it.

Glow follows Harper, a home-schooled teenager with a strict mom, who has her on a strict curfew. Harper just wants to play soccer with her friends, and while she’s out sees something crazy, like unexplainable crazy. Her town along with other cities in the world are infected with Maasai Mara Sleeping syndrome which is a nice way of saying: first you get sick, then, you die.

The plot, really goes crazy from there. After the first 20%, we’re hit with a plot twist that is maybe a little over-the-top, and a little rushed on the execution.

The writing ends up hindering most of the book, as it’s written in present tense which can already be a hit and miss, but especially for this book, as so much of the story is told to the readers and not shown. Adding this to the present-tense writing style and, the book draggggggs.

The characters also weren’t as likable, or unlikable as I wanted them to be. Harper has been thorough a lot in this book, and yet she’s boring and kind of flat. She doesn’t hardly get mad at her family (especially not to their faces) which she has every right to. And her main character traits: her love for biology and soccer, are kind of forgotten at some point and never mentioned again. And there were several times where she made a few comments (even just in her head) that bothered me. At one point she thinks:

I struggle to keep my face straight. If he wants to destroy the human race to get revenge on a few bullies, it’s not wonder he wasn’t popular.

This is already a kind of mean thought, but coming from someone who’s never gone to public school? The guy just confessed to complete strangers how he was bullied in high school, and how that’s when he realized the world wasn’t what is should be. Which he’s right. There shouldn’t be bullies in a perfect world.
At the end of the book, I felt as if I still didn’t know her as a character, that there was nothing unique about her, other than maybe her genetics.

Overall, this just wasn’t for me. It was very difficult to get to the end, and if I hadn’t received an ARC, I probably would have DNF’ed it.

While I am very grateful for the review copy, I just couldn't finish this one. I think the majority of the problem is that I couldn't connect to the main character, Harper. I found that she was a little too boring and I didn't really care about what happens to her. I kept putting this one down and coming back to it because I don't like not finishing review copies. Then I looked at some other reviews here on NetGalley to make up my mind and was confused to see that aliens come into the picture. This book is not for me. Hope it finds the audience that it needs

Hard to read at times but an enjoyable book. Storyline slow to get started but once it’s started it was much better.

Firstly, thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for giving me the opportunity to read and review this book.

I enjoyed the basic plot of the book and even some of the characters. Overall, it was just okay for me. I think the biggest issue I had was that there was a lot of elements that were so drawn out they became tedious to read. If the pace was a lot tighter I think it would have made for a much more enjoyable story. With this type of sci -fi story none of it should feel boring, but it often did.

I would still be interested in reading a second book in this series if these issues are addressed.

This starting of promising but then turned into something completely different and just boring. I was disinterested for the rest of the book. The characters also just fell a bit flat to me.

I really struggled to finish this. The first 20% is engaging as Harper navigates an overbearing parent and an outbreak of a deadly disease in her small town. Then it becomes ‘alien school’ and the next 400 pages is endless description of relatively mundane comings and goings. Harper loses all agency, and her so-called abilities are just very confusing. The story is also really slow and full of ableist language that I didn’t care for.

This book held promise but was ultimately disappointing.
The description differed very much from what the story actually was (the synopsis sounds like this story is about the Maasai Mara Sleeping Syndrome and maybe even government conspiracy, but then we have aliens?). While it took me off-guard, the premise was still intriguing and exciting so I didn't mind too much.
Except it wasn't exciting. The story held such promise but except for about 3 chapters in the first 30% of the book, nothing. happened. From a plot that could have been incredible, we somehow end up with description and explanation upon description and explanation of the aliens and their world and history and culture, and these explanations go into about ten times more detail than would have been necessary and hence take so much longer than necessary. The only thing that kept me reading was the fact that this was an ARC and I wanted to be able to review it properly.
The thing is, it COULD be an amazing story - it just needs a lot of work, to be pared back and reworked. I sincerely hope it goes through a big editing process before publication, because it would be such a shame for a great premise to go to waste.

This is a book where the premise lulls you in and the writing kills you off. I had a "oh no" moment with the writing and lack of character depth or dimension from the first page, but I kept trudging through thinking that it would get better and it was just a rocky start (because some books have those). Nope. This was rocky through it all I got up to 24% and couldn't take any more. From the very beginning the characters (especially Harper) felt so flat they could have been considered paper dolls and as the story progressed someone took lighter fluid to them and set them on fire, I didn't stick around long enough to see if they turned to ash or not, but by golly were they non existent when I checked out.

Apart from the characters being flat and not there, the writing style felt weird and the dialogue was cringy and constantly repetitive (If I see the word Enter again I will scream). The pace is super slow and I feel like the novel is too long for the story that is trying to be told and can be condensed severely.  I was enraptured by the synopsis given to me but I feel gutted that the execution of this story fell super short.

Unknown disease killing people off in droves, strange sightings, government cover ups, aliens..?! When I first read the premise I thought this sounded like a really interesting story.
I made it to about 45% before jumping back a few chapters to try rereading before I finally decided to DNF this title. I found the cast to be quite juvenile and unintersting, the writing repetitive (the word enter or entering is used multiple times in one paragraph as an example) At times the descriptions, while detailed, became so overly done they became confusing.. Which is a shame as there are some really interesting ideas as far as the alien landscapes and beings go.
There is a decent amount of potential here to be a solid sci-fi story. I don't feel it needs to be 600+ pages to get feel of it across. Streamlining the text would do wonders for this title. I looked up her personal author page and it says that this title is her first major project. I do think based on what I read she could add an unique voice to the sci-fi genre once she gets some more experience under her belt.

*E-ARC kindly provided by NetGalley and Ruby & Topaz Publishing in exchange for an honest review

The Quick Cut: A girl stuck in a quarantine zone discovers her life is not exactly what it appears to be.

A Real Review:
Thank you to Ruby & Topaz Publishing for providing the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I'm going to be paying for reading this book for a long time and the headache that's still lingering is confirmation of that. As much of a mainstay as Aliens are to the science fiction realm, it is far too easy to do it wrong and write them in such a way that becomes comical (in all the wrong ways). This book hits that mark very strongly with its lead, Harper.

Harper is frustrated with her life. Locked up by her mom, she feels trapped at home in the way she's homeschooled and constantly criticized while her brother and sister are praised. However, her life goes spinning off it's axis when she ends up quarantined alone in her neighborhood after a dangerous illness sweeps through. Everyone except her died and somehow she's immune. How? Well - it turns out her mom & brother are actually aliens experimenting on her, having turned her into a human-alien hybrid for their use. Insert her entire life (including looks) falling apart.

In theory, this book should be amazing. The premise is solid and intrigued me from the moment I read the book description. So what went wrong? In short: everything about the execution of the idea. Harper is completely unlikable and comes off as whiny, to the point where when she finds out she's a hybrid I was happy her life is a sham. She spends so much time blaming everyone else for what is going on instead of working to improve her own life (before AND after alien transformation).

Beyond that, the book is too long with far too much content plot wise being packed in. By the time I got to the 350 page mark, it felt like a mental marathon. With 200 plus more pages to go, thats the last reaction you want from a reader. I feel like one of the hybrids myself with all those book details jammed into my brain and spinning constantly through my head.

This book could have been great, but it's recklessness in it's finished product leaves me exhausted as a reader.

My rating: 2 out of 5

Received as an e-book via NetGalley for review purposes. I found Glow to be an interesting Sci-Fi story and would recommend to anyone who enjoyed reading 'The Themis Files' trilogy by Sylvain Neuvel. Glow sets the scene for what is to come in the series. And while there may be a slow start, I would give book 2 a chance to see what happens next now that we have a fully formed back story.

This book had such a great sounding premise, but I ended up being very let down by the plot.

First off - I HATED the way homeschooling was represented. Sure, sometimes it works out that way, but we don't need more bad representation of homeschooling in the world. The fact that her mother was so overbearing that she was in trouble for playing on a sports team was just stupid. We need more books normalizing homeschooling and showing that it is a viable choice for many children.

The first third of the book was good - the plot moved well, the story seemed interested. But once we realize it was ALIENS the whole time and that Harper is a hybrid and gets taken in by the aliens, the story seems to just stall out. It was a lot of tell and not show. We learn everything about the aliens race and plans through tedious amounts of dialogue and that's about where I just gave up. I just didn't care any more about the characters or what was going to happen. Which shouldn't happen in a book where the aliens are trying to destroy the human race and one girl must try to stop it. That's an exciting premise and it should have led to a much more exciting story.

I rate it 2 stars for the good premise.

This was an interesting concept with lacking execution, unfortunately.
I would hope it goes into heavier editing, because it felt very dragged, which is the reason it took me a while to finish it off.
There are plenty of moments where i kept asking yourself Why did i spend time reading about this? E.g. Do i care about Harper’s friends i am never seeing again?
As a first book of series it does not deliver enough to get me interested in how it all unravels in future books. It would’ve been better in half the length and a little more information to hook you up for the future books.

Me and the writing style didn't mesh really well. I didn't connect with the characters and didn't find the story to be of much interest.

In present-day America, a disease seems to be sweeping the nation. People seem to fall asleep and then they just die. On the night the disease has another outbreak, seventeen-year-old Harper witnesses some glowing sort of creature. As her small town falls under quarantine, she begins to realize there might be something more to the outbreak.

Full confession: I made it 25%. To be fair, I did fly through that 25% but most of it was through skimming. There is a lot of unnecessary filler in this book: conversations with Harper's friends and family that go nowhere, soccer games, etc. I was shocked to realize that the book is a whopping 620 pages long apparently. So much of this could be have eliminated for better pacing. Unfortunately, this is not for me.

I never wanted to pick Glow: Book I, Potency up to read it and it was a sheer battle of will to just get through the novel. Glow : Book I, Potency suffers from severe pacing problems, flat characters, and cringy dialogue. Though the idea of the novel itself was interesting and obviously well-researched, its execution simply couldn’t save the novel.

The story follows 16-year-old Harper as a sickness, known as the Maasai Mara Sleeping Syndrome spreads throughout the world. This sickness renders the stricken in a heightened state of euphoria before they fall asleep until they die. This syndrome is what initially attracted me to the novel, but very little time is actually spent on it, despite being extremely well-researched. Instead, readers learn that the cause of the mysterious disease is aliens, and that they’re trying to wipe out the human race entirely.



Harper is soon captured by these said aliens and learns that she isn’t entirely human. She’s actually an alien-human hybrid. Most of the novel then deals with Harper trying to get used to her life as a hybrid, among other hybrids. And this is where things should get interesting, but instead they’re horrendously boring. Harper goes along with whatever comes her way–she doesn’t fight the alien’s brainwashing that all humans are evil, she doesn’t struggle to remember her life as a human as they make her forget, and she makes friends with two other hybrids and gets swept up in their plans for escape because she doesn’t have an original thought of her own.



To top it off, despite being an insanely flat character incapable of making her own decisions, Harper is the typical “special” main character. She has the titular ability to “glow” and can turn invisible and teleport, something that other hybrids cannot do. I never once found this exciting, despite how the ability is supposed to be amazing. I simply couldn’t get attached to Harper or any of the other characters at all. They just didn’t feel real.



Throughout the whole book, I never understood why Harper and her friends were even bothering trying to escape. The aliens feed them, give them jobs, and are actively destroying Earth. To put it simply, there is not a home to which they can even return. Plus, Harper and her friends don’t even look human anymore. What kind of welcoming would they even receive? The only explanations given for their drive to escape are vague and unconvincing. They say it’s because they have an inkling that the aliens have a sinister purpose for them, but it never comes to any fruition. So literally the characters are trying to escape on what amounts to a hunch. To me, this seemed silly and anticlimactic.



This isn’t surprising as most of the novel, is in fact, anticlimactic. Glow: Potency suffers from extreme pacing issues. For the majority of the novel, literally nothing interesting is happening. The readers follow Harper and her friends through extremely long and tedious descriptions of their new homes and jobs with the aliens, or other things as mundane as exercising. On the rare occasion that I was not bored, I was faced with jarring moments of actions that completely threw me and made me think, “Wait, what just happened?” It seems there was either no action or too much, and nothing in between. In one instance, Harper’s escape from a quarantine zone is simply interrupted by a “Click.” Then a person is suddenly pulling a gun on her:



“Brett leads us over to the bicycle. ‘Harper you stand on the pegs. I’ll ride. We’re going to meet Mom with the car–’ His eyes stop on something. Click. I turn around. Behind us, Max stands rigid, his arm outstretched and his gun pointed at Brett. Even in the limited light, I can see the white of his eyes behind his face shield. ‘I changed my mind. I can’t let you do this, man,’ he says.”



Similarly off-putting is the rest of the dialogue of the novel. The author is clearly trying to use colloquial phrases of teenagers, but it comes off super cringey–like a parent who tries to be “hip” by using the slang of their children. Phrases like, “I got this. I got you, bae. Chill,” as well as, “don’t get pissed at me bro,” and “this sucks balls” are ubiquitous. A lot of this dialogue is used right on top of each other and it’s like being bombarded with try-hard attempts to make the teenagers seem realistic. I also was similarly off put in the very beginning of the novel by one of Harper’s teenaged human friends having a smoking problem and carrying a flask to soccer practice. All of it is clearly how the author thinks teenagers act, but she seems severely out of touch with the majority of them. This makes her main characters seem more like the actual aliens themselves then realistic people.



Another thing that irked me was that the new hybrids to the alien habitat were forced to go through a process called “Leveling,” in which the supposed worst parts of their life–some of it is fabricated–with humans are shown to all of the other hybrids. Then the anti-human propaganda is laid on thick. But this all seems really pointless as the aliens then turn around and make the hybrids forget all of their meaningful relations with humans–good or bad. This renders what is obviously supposed to be an extremely emotional event a complete and total waste of time.



I really wouldn’t recommend Glow: Book I, Potency to anyone, not even to die-hard fans of science fiction or young adult novels. Most of the book is either filled with long stretches of incredibly dull information, only interspersed by strange moments of short-lived action, weird dialogue, and flat characters that are impossible to relate to.

I really, really wanted to like the book.

The premise sounded very enticing and intriguing, but it stayed there - in the idea of what the story could have been.

The writing threw me off from the start - it is written like a fan-fic and not a really good one at that. When you overuse words such as "ugh" and "sigh", it doesn't add anything to the plot, but rather takes from what could have been a 'tighter' pacing.

The characters are thrown at the reader haphazardly, not really fleshing out their motives at the first place.

Almost everyone in the book is very self centered and negative person, which doesn't leave a lot of room to create connections to them or to really care about any of their actions.

The dialogue is choppy - sometimes I had to re-read pieces of dialogue, because I got lost of who said what to whom.

The book cover is beautiful and I still think this could be a good story, but it does need a lot of work.

Thank you kindly to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with the free ARC.

I loved the cover for this book and I thought the description was intriguing. Unfortunately, didn't connect with any of the characters and just couldn't get into it.

I don't usually leave reviews for books I don't love because just because they aren't for me doesn't mean they won't appeal to someone else, but I got this ARC free from NetGalley in exchange for my review.

After reading the description, I was so intrigued and wanted to emerge myself into this world. I have to agree with others that this had a great start. However, after about 40% in, I had to force myself to finish. I do know, that someone will fall in love with this story, it just wasn’t for me. There was a lot that could have been done to make it a more interesting story for me. The plot was there, my issue was with the execution.

3,5 rounded up to 4

Glow is the first book in a series. Our first person narrator is Harper Loomis, a seventeen-year-old homeschooled girl who sneaks out to play soccer, and who hopes to go to Stanford to study science. She’s got a paranoid mom, no mention of a dad until way later, and an older brother with whom she argues all the time.

Her besties are more interesting than her family—Katie a bit of a wild child, Maria, a good-hearted, smart girl whose family thinks it a waste of time for her to try for college, and Jane, whose family is heavily into conspiracy theories.

Harper’s life takes an abrupt turn when she’s first locked into her house as her neighborhood is quarantined because of a possible deadly outbreak of a mysterious disease. When she discovers her neighbors are all dead, she tries to run . . .

And ends up in the hands of aliens, who proceed to alter her into a hybrid. The bulk of this very long novel is her life as a hybrid, and her decision what to do about it.

There’s a lot going for the novel, and a lot that holds it back from being great. The alien hybrid section is by far the longest, and it doesn't help that the book is told in the now-hip first person present tense. The wodges of detail about alien biology are especially awkward in present tense; it's clear that the author delights in scientific extrapolation, as the alien biology is extremely detailed.

We learn far more about alien biology than we do about the alien world—or than we learned about Harper’s family members; she tries to hold onto her family [[SPOILER when she discovers her memory is being wiped—she tries hard to hang onto her brother, caring about him in a sudden about-face after he tries to help her escape, but there was scant relationship developed between them. We find out in a throw-away remark that he’s new to the family, Harper having been told he’d lived with their father, a dynamic that would have been far more interesting if developed. What teen reader isn’t intensely interested in sudden half or step siblings, especially really cute ones? END SPOILER]]. Caring about those she rejected is an admirable trait, but as we never really saw anything except Harper’s adversarial relationship with them, it feels somewhat tacked on.

I liked the relationships Harper develops in the alien world, and the gradual decision to do something about her situation. The climactic section is a real nail-biter, especially after some excruciatingly detailed descriptions of human venality and cruelty in the middle, intensified by the knowledge that the aliens are systematically wiping out all human life.

I really liked Harper. I liked her curiosity, her self-doubts, and I’m always a sucker for developing mysterious powers. Harper’s power comes suddenly, but when it happens, it’s awesome.

In short, a rocky start (that desperately needs proofreading), but a lot going for it; I will definitely be on the lookout for Book Two.