Glass Houses (Morganville Vampires, #1)

by Rachel Caine

[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.