Glint (review)

As young children, Ellie and her younger brother, Danny, acted out complex adventures featuring Argent, a fictional character whom they created to distract themselves during difficult times. Five years later, Danny has disappeared on his eleventh birthday, and Ellie, frustrated with her exclusion from the police search, begins an unofficial hunt for him. Meanwhile, Danny, drugged and rapidly declining, only knows that he seems to be in a concrete basement, and he returns to Argent's story to comfort himself. As Ellie pushes herself beyond her usual timidity to face her increasingly creepy boyfriend, the growing accusations directed at her father, and her own fear as she discovers ominous clues about her brother's location, Argent's story takes a parallel path, as Argent begins a quest to save a kidnapped baby dragon and along the way determine her own destiny. Intriguingly, there are two potentially separate novels that constitute this British import: both Ellie and Argent are well-developed and vivid protagonists, and their individual stories overlap only through Danny, whose imagination gives Argent life and whose absence drives Ellie to reconsider hers. The result is a compelling mystery (complete with convincing red herrings) and a creative, rich fantasy, both of which are sufficiently well told to satisfy their respective audiences.