2.5 stars. 
 I wavered back and forth with how I felt about this book. There were several passages that tested my patience, but there were also some clever twists and turns. Plus the sciencey stuff seemed well researched. 
 As many reviews will tell you, Glow is about two ships, the Empyrean and the New Horizon, on a mission to colonize a new world and give hope to the dying Earth they left behind. 
 The Empyrean is secular and filled with different races, where sexual harassment runs rampant because.. secularism? 
 Then the New Horizon is a ship where everyone gets along because... religion, amirite? And by religion I mean Christianity. Clearly no other religion qualifies as religious enough for the so-called religious ship. 
 The conflict arises when the women in both ships start struggling to conceive, and one ship is able to figure out how to solve the problem, while the other is given a fake cure that leaves the women permanently infertile. Why would one ship do that to the other? Who knows. Blame it on secularism and misogyny, I guess. 
 Speaking of misogyny, there are strong twisted sexual undertones throughout the novel that create uncomfortable dread and smack of an agenda. Waverly, the main character, even mentions several times that (view spoiler)[ the children bore by the women who stole her eggs are her own children, and implies that the men who fertilized them pretty much had sex with her. (hide spoiler)] 
 Another thing that really bothered me is that the vast majority of the population in both ships are white Americans. Generally I don't support ham-fisted efforts to add diversity for the sake of pandering, but the Empyrean is a Noah's Ark of sorts. People from all over the world (from different cultures, ethniticies, races and religions) were selected to colonize the new world, yet the tension in the novel is derived from Christian vs non-Christian values. 
 This creates some dissonance toward the end when (view spoiler)[ Kieran has a strange revelation about how to inspire the secular ship and save the day: holding Christians services in a ship filled with different races and different religious inclinations 
 It's true that this creates an interesting role reversal when Waverly associates Kieran's newfound religious leadership to the murdering New Horizon leader, Anne Mather, but the story is so laser focused on these uninteresting characters that the potential of the premise seems squandered. (hide spoiler)] 
 The setting is ripe for an allegory of international interactions and tensions by using the microcosm of the ship for a creative analysis of our current world affairs. 
 But young adult readers don't care about that, I guess, so let's give them explosions and love triangles and unnecessary deaths of underdeveloped characters; awkward exposition (via forced dialogue), lots of explaining and dumbing down whatever just happened in previous scenes, and oh so many repetitive phrases and imagery (biting of the lips, biting of the cheeks, etc, etc, etc). 
 Overall a plot-heavy novel with a great premise that shoots off like a rocket then flails around like an untied balloon.