Glass Houses: The Morganville Vampires, Book I (Morganville Vampires, #1)

by Rachel Caine

College freshman Claire Danvers has had enough of her nightmarish dorm situation, where the popular girls never let her forget just where she ranks in the school's social scene: somewhere less than zero.

When Claire heads off-campus, the imposing old house where she finds a room may not be much better. Her new roommates don't show many signs of life. But they'll have Claire's back when the town's deepest secrets come crawling out, hungry for fresh blood.

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• ISBN10: 0451219945
• ISBN13: 9780451219947
• Publish Date: 3 October 2006 (first published 1 October 2006)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Penguin Books Australia
• Imprint: Signet
• Format: Paperback (US Mass Market)
• Pages: 256
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780451219947

Reviews

[Amber (The Literary Phoenix)]

Read more reviews like this one at The Literary Phoenix.

Claire is in serious trouble.

It was just one little snide comment, but now she's got the meanest girl at school trying to kill her.  After she gets pushed down the stairs, Claire decides it's time to get out of the college dorms.  Fortunately, there's this place called the "Glass House" that's looking for a roommate and after a little bit of crying, the housemates accept her, even though she's only sixteen.

There's more going on in Morgansville than meets the eye.  Secretly, this town is run by vampires!  They really hate Claire.  And they're looking for a magical book that they can't read.  Maybe if Claire can find that book she can get her new friends out of the cataclysmic mess she made from them - but only if her parents don't pull her out of school first.

This book was genuinely horrible?

Lets talk about the nightmare that is Claire.  Claire is really smart - an early graduate and she's been accepted into ALL the best Ivy League schools.  But her parents don't want her to be too far from home so instead she picks a party school in Texas.  Only she doesn't party.  For fun - she studies!  And to quote one of the other characters, she's "smarter than 90% of the people in world."  Which is so, so frustrating, because Claire is a fool.  Her book smarts seem minimal, her common sense is low, and her reasoning is zilch.  All the "book smarts" seem to lead up to ONE moment in this book which frankly I knew from just watching crime shows.  Just, no.

The plot goes nowhere in this book.  Every time Claire leaves the house something horrible and completely improbable happens to her.  It's like a Scooby Doo film where Shaggy and Scooby bumble into clues without meaning to.  She always gets away, usually for unlikely reasons.  The girl should go buy a lottery ticket because she's got the best luck in the world.

There were things I wanted to like about this book.

There was this whole ghostly subplot going on that I thought had the potential to be really interesting, and I kept waiting for more to happen with it.  Unfortunately it was rushed and easily accepted and not nearly as entertaining as I hoped it would be.  And I wanted to like the characters - but they were all so flat!  Cliche!  No!

Then there's the vampires.  This is the first book of the Morganville Vampires and yet... the vamps are pretty minimal?  The ones we do see prior to the end of the book mostly just lurk and act a little intimidating and are easily outwitted by a sixteen-year-old girl.  And the ones at the end of the book mostly just lurk and brake windows soooo not impressed.

This is a tolerable book.

For all its faults, I didn't want to throw this book against a wall.  It wasn't good!  But it wasn't the worst thing in the world, either.  It was tolerable.  It was finishable.  Will I be seeking the rest of the series?  No!  There was waaaay too much cheese for me to want to read more, and no awesome character compensation, either.

If you're looking for a silly, fluffy college book about girls who always find themselves in trouble with a side dish of vampires that like to show their fangs but not do much else, you'll like this one.

[Leah]

I loved this! I've put off reading this series for so long, but I bought Glass Houses and then found the rest of the books in the charity shop for £1 each (!) and couldn't resist. They've been staring me down for weeks and I've cracked! I'm reading them!

Glass Houses was a brilliant debut, leaving you gasping for more - I mean, what an ending!!!! So much so that I'm diving straight into The Dead Girls' Dance because I must devour this series as quickly as possible!

I love Claire, her naivety, her character, everything about her. I love Shane and Eve and Michael. ❤️❤️❤️ I love their dynamic, how they get on so well and protect each other and I'm a bit terrified as well because all author's who have written such long series inevitably kill off a character or two, and man, that's terrifying.

I am, however, dying to see Monica get some kind of epic comeuppance. The sooner the better as far as I'm concerned. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a second book to start... 🙈🙈🙈🙈

[Angie]

10/11/15: Rereading!!!

I remember reading the first couple of chapters of this on Amazon several years ago, but then I got distracted by Twilight. Now I've finally read the whole book, and I have to say I'm quite impressed!

Claire is a great protagonist! She's super smart, starting college at 16 (so did I!), and is a complete outcast for it. She's tormented by the girls in her dorm, led by the utterly vicious Monica. Vicious is probably an understatement though; that girl is psychotic! The rest of the cast is great and entertaining as well. Eve is gothic, and spunky, and I adored her! I want her to be my friend! Shane is goofy and fun, but very sweet and protective when the situation requires. Now, Michael is very intriguing. He has some secrets and I found them fascinating. He's not what I was expecting.

In fact, Glass Houses wasn't what I was expecting at all. I figured that I would enjoy it, but I ended up really enjoying it! I love the set up of having a small town corrupted by vampires, with some humans under protection and some not. What the author came up with for when a vampire fails to change someone was really interesting, too. This book keeps a relatively fast pace, so there's never a dull moment as Claire and Co. try to stay on the good side of the Morganville Vampires.

I'm very happy to have found another series to give me my vampire fix! I just wish I had the second book, since damn that cliffhanger!

Read more of my reviews at Pinkindle Reads & Reviews.

[celinenyx]

The Morganville Vampires together with Vampire Academy and House of Night must be the YA vampire series trifecta. The Morganville Vampire series is slightly lesser known than the other two, but still very popular, and published in the high-days of vampire fiction in the 00's.

Claire is an exceptional student, but because her parents consider her too young, she goes to Morganville instead of Harvard or Yale. Here she meets the ultimate homicidal mean girls that have decided to make her life hell, and soon she gets mixed up in something even worse.

The beginning of Glass Houses is slightly ridiculous. The resident mean girls are over the top, and Claire often acts like fourteen instead of sixteen. The age level isn't helped by the fact that her parents treat her in an extremely selfish way - who the hell sends their child off to some random crap university with a huge drop-out rate, when the kid could go get an Ivy League education? The first few chapters are extremely juvenile.

I was looking forward to reading a young-adult book set in college, but this was worse than many high school novels. Maybe I just won the social lottery, but I was never secretly pinched or kicked or tripped or cussed at by other students in high school, nor did I do any of those to others. Does that kind of thing actually happen? For me high school was mostly peaceful co-existence, and college is even more laid-back. It took a lot of suspension of disbelief to deal with this childish bullying theme.

Once we meet the gang of Eve, Shane, and Michael, the story gets a lot better. They are all slightly more mature, and have these family dynamics going on which are entertaining, engaging and endearing. Together with Claire we learn more about the truth and rules of Morganville. A lot is still left in the dark in Glass Houses, with plenty of fighting and running away without the reader (and Claire) truly grasping what they're exactly running away from. The atmosphere of dread is strong without there being a clear source.

Glass Houses serves as a decent introduction into the Morganville Vampires series. By the end of it, we have an interesting set-up for the next book, which I'm very much looking forward to. Glass Houses has its issues, especially the beginning, but the story quickly engrossed me.

[ellieroth]

¿Qué decir? Es mi serie favorita de toda la vida, es de los únicos libros que me acuerdo casi todos los nombres, con los que puedo jugar bromas, la saga con la que me atrevo hacer incluso un post con un montón de referencias sin equivocarme mucho.

Me gusta que por fin tenemos a una nerd como protagonista y que no pierde ese encanto nerd.

Este es el inicio de mi saga favorita y amo este libro.

[Suz @ Bookish Revelations]

Review coming soon, great build up to what is a very promising paranormal series.

[Amber]

I enjoyed it just as much the second time around! This time I'll be able to write a review. Yay!

[MurderByDeath]

This book was recommended to my by a friend who hasn't yet steered me wrong, but as I read the first part of this book I'll admit I thought "well, there's a first time for everything". The constant beatings got to be a bit much, and for someone so intelligent, she seemed to rush into potentially dangerous situations with little or no fore thought. But as we got to the second half of the book, things got interesting and I can see why this series is a keeper.

The residents of Glass House are all interesting and likeable. The action at the end held my attention until the end. The hints of romance gave me something to look forward to. And I'm intrigued by the character of Amalie. All of these reasons will have me picking up the next book soon.

[Jo]

I've read Glass Houses before, before I ever started blogging, and so I'm writing a proper review for it. It's been quite a while since I last read Glass Houses, that I couldn't quite remember the story. I remembered Claire left her dorm at uni to go live with Michael, Eve and Shane after being attacked by Monica, I remembered her finding out about the vampires, and I remembered a search for the book, but there was quite a lot I didn't remember, which made the reread pretty exciting!

Some of the things I didn't remember. Claire has had black hair since when?! I've always imagined her as a blonde! Probably because of the cover of my edition (above). I'd forgotten just how psycho Monica is - who I have always imagined to look like Megan Fox; Monica is a psychotic version of Megan Fox's character, Carla in Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen - and how she actually wants Claire dead! She's a cow throughout the series, but I forgot just how bad she is in this book. I also forgot the introduction of certain characters in this, I didn't think they were introduced until several books into the series! And I forgot how this book ended! I thought something that happens in a later book ended this one! It got all confusing! But almost like a completely different, unread book, as I wasn't sure what was happening! It was fun! And I didn't realise the "will they? won't they?" romance between Claire and Shane even started simmering in this book! I thought it happened later on! So that was a lovely surprise and really fun to rediscover! Ohhh, it's so sweet! I do love those guys.

The story itself is exciting! The vampires are scary, and it's sitll easy to get freaked out right along with Claire even though I've read all the other books. It's so cool to have a series were the vampires are scary, there don't seem to be many of them any more. The action is still edge-of-your-seat good as I had forgotten the specifics. However, having read all the other books, despite Glass Houses being brilliant, it's very much a first book in the series, because so much more seems to happen in the other novels. But still a great start to the series! I love it, and I'm looking forward to rereading the others!

From

[violetpeanut]

This is not great literature but it's a fun, light and quick read that doesn't require much thought. If you're into the whole vampire craze right now you may want to check this out.