This review contains spoilers of the previous three books in this series.

Book 4 in the Plated Prisoner series is perhaps the longest and the slowest. At the end of the previous book, Auren literally explodes all over the castle and uses her power to kill multiple people, including King Midas. But the story being spun by our newest bad guy, Queen Kalia of the Sixth Kingdom, is that Auren stole her power from King Midas and will steal the power of others as well.

I have to admit, I didn’t enjoy this book as much as the previous one and I almost gave up on the series altogether. This book was full of a lot of backstory and we're able to learn about the history of the other minor characters. We see a lot of flashbacks to the childhood of Slade, previously Rip, the king of the Fourth Kingdom. These flashbacks are cruel and we see more shallow character development in his mom and dad. They seem unnecessary but will come into play in future books if you can make it through the hundreds of slow pages.

We also follow Auren trying to make her way through a very painful injury that happened late in the previous book. We're forced to wade through pages and pages of self-pity and psychological trauma that seem too much and too dramatic for what it was. At many points, I got so annoyed with the pacing of these scenes that I resorted to scanning through the pages quickly as opposed to absorbing them.

This book also contains the stereotypical training scenes much like pretty much every fight movie and book since Rocky. I can just hear the theme music overlaying these scenes before ending on the Rocky steps.

Queen Malina is still getting some chapters and I feel like her story is getting much more interesting. And we're also seeing a budding relationship between one of the other king's saddles and Slade's favorite troop leader. This relationship, however, seems to follow the same tired elements of enemies to lovers that we've already seen between Auren and Rip/Slade.

There aren't many plot twists or fun surprises in Glow, and much of the story is easily forgettable. It's like this book contained the info dump we'll need in future books but it's hard to get through. Like taking your medicine.