Sarah O'Connor

“Family almost always means someone somewhere doesn’t get to be it,” (Smith 224).

Petra and Patch remember a time they created a Ghost after hearing a horrifying story as children. Thirty years later, Petra finds a ghost horse making a mess and knows she can do only one thing: call her estranged sister for help.

I was intrigued by Glyph because it is a sequel to Gliff and I loved the idea of writing a sequel to a book with the same title and different spelling. I thought it seemed like such a fun thing for an author to do, and was lucky enough for my hold to come in from the library right when I was reading Gliff so I was able to read both books one after another. Glyph however surprised me in a lot of ways, because while I was expecting a continuation and conclusion from the story in Gliff, I got another story entirely.

Unlike Gliff, Glyph is not an adaptation of Brave New World but a contemporary novel set in the present day. Now one could argue that the way our world is heading nowadays maybe we are living in a Brave New World, but I still haven’t read the book so really can’t comment. Funnily enough, Gliff does make an appearance, but not in name. It is a book that Patch has sent to Petra to read. There are references to the children, the horse, and questions on it’s ambiguity. Smith seems to be having fun with her readers here, and I did like how it made the book meta, but it only made me wonder about the pairing of these books as a series together.

There are some parallels: there are two siblings, sisters named Petra and Patch who are each affected by a disturbing war story they heard as children which had them imagine the ghost of the dead figure in the story and, briefly, act as mediums for a fellow students dead dog until it blows out of proportion. There is some mention of grief here, of memory and death and how we can’t really remember a person, an event, or a story as clearly as when it was experienced. There is talk of war, of protest, of having a voice and how we should use our voices. Glyph is it’s own story with it’s own characters and purpose, it is not trying to be like Gliff but I do think some of these themes were intentional in it’s sequel.

While I still enjoyed the writing and the characters, I didn’t enjoy Glyph as much as Gliff. I wonder if it’s because Gliff was clearly fictional while Glyph is firmly set in our reality. It can’t be ignored or argued that what is happening in our world is happening, Smith is forcing her readers to confront it in Glyph while in Gliff it could easily be patted away as fiction, as an adaptation of a classic novel while Glyph tells us that this is our brave new world, and it isn’t good. It makes me wonder what would have happened had I read Glyph first, if I would want to read Gliff or even if there is an order to reading them in a different order.

Glyph is still a fantastic read and I love the fun Smith continues to have with language as well as the voices of her characters. It’s still a wonderful series, and won’t be the last book I read by Smith!

Publication: May 19 2026
Publisher: Pantheon
Pages: 288 pages
Source: Library
Genre: Fiction, Contemporary
My Rating: ⛤⛤⛤.5
Summary:

Ghosts don’t exist.
They don’t. End of.
Story, however.
It is haunting.
Everything tells it.

It all starts when Petra and her little sister Patch hear a horrifying story from the past and find themselves making up a ghost.

Is it imaginary? Is it real?

Then it all starts again thirty years later when Petra, now estranged from Patch, finds a phantom horse kicking the furniture to pieces in her bedroom.

What to do? She phones her sister.

In a chiarascuro dance through our increasingly antagonistic era, Glyph asks if we’re attending to the history that’s made us and to the history we’re making.