GLINT is… an odd one. The concept (or rather, the world chosen to build the story around) is already in a very peculiar place - a world where *most* methods of transport are replaced by teleporting mirrors. While it sounds cool at a glance, the end result is a very “weird” sense of worldbuilding where almost all details are ignored (since the other world is the same as the real world except the mirror aspect), yet the one difference of the mirror transportation is never actually explored in a satisfying enough way. The detail about a police force governing mirror travel is cool but we’ve only seen the surface of it, and not much else after, while the chapter with horseback riding hampers the worldbuilding in quite a significant way (why are ride animals still here? What about old vehicles like bikes? etc.). While the premise is nice, it never dug deeper than it should.

As for the story itself, it suffers from the same fate. The opening is much more like a thriller/noir film, but the tone shifted to happy romance quite abruptly (a rather obvious mark on fulfilling the contest’s prompts rather than keeping to the true nature of the story). But towards the end, the “tension” was created with almost too quick solution, again likely due to the fact that there needs to be an obstacle for the budding romance to fit the prompt.

Because of all this artificial creation and lack of deep dive in building, the characters were not much more than just surface-level indication of what they were shown. Chance is… a guy with honestly not much of a notable quality aside from his attraction to Glint and his disdain towards the mirror police. Glint is a girl from the “real” world with a dream for travel, and that’s about it.

Overall, I honestly feel like this book needs double, maybe even triple the word count to fully flesh out the concepts it has, and maybe if it were to be in a contest not about romance, staying to the tone it set up from the start would do things much better