My friend Marsha Mielke loaned me this book, saying that she'd be interested to hear what I thought about the religious aspect of it. I'm an atheist, and while she doesn't share my views, we have easy conversations about religion and belief. The thing is, that while some atheists find religious themes unattractive or uncomfortable, I actually don't mind them when they are used effectively. Thirteen years of Catholic school steeped me in the stories of that religion, so there is almost a comfort in recognizing the symbols and myths that play themselves out over the course of human history. While I don't believe in a god and the attendant behaviors, I have no problem with the fact that many people do--unless they are using their religion to oppress, condemn, or judge others.
That's the thing that makes the story of Glow interesting: a religious theme is used to explore societal issues, human survival, and treatment of others. The setting is aboard two spacecraft hurtling through space on a decades-long journey to a replacement planet in order to start Earth culture over again. (I'm sure they'll do it right this time.) These, of course, are huge crafts, with gardens, farms, labs, living quarters--basically very Next Generation-ish. What we come to learn over the course of time is that the two crafts started off with one difference; crew members on one were religious/ Christian, and the crew on the other were non-believers and members of other religions, with a few Christians mixed in. As the story unfolds, Waverly and Kieran, teens in the first generation born in space aboard the mixed belief ship, must face the problems caused by another difference that developed after the ships--traveling light years apart--left Earth. While their ship managed to develop a cure to the infertility that plagued the crafts, the Christian ship never did. Nor were they willing to share their cure with their Christian counterparts. (Yeah, sort of makes the outlook on successfully avoiding the problems that caused this migration in the first place look a bit bleak, huh?)
Enter violent attacks, religious fervor, teen angst...
The book is pretty good, even if it doesn't compare to the Hunger Games series (a required reference on the jacket cover every TeenLit SciF Post Apocalyptic series). The romance playing second fiddle to the societal structures and issues explored. The religious theme doesn't fully present itself until the last third of the book, and it doesn't come down too specifically on either side of the aisle. In the closing Acknowledgements, Ryan explains that "The theories of Sacvan Bercovitch, Ph.D., described in his remarkable book The Puritan Origins of the American Self shaped the major themes in Glow." I have to confess that I won't be racing out to explore those theories in the original, but I will patiently wait for them to make their way into the sequel.
