Glass Houses by Rachel Caine: Review

Claire Danvers is a freshman at college in Morganville, Texas.  It’s an unprestigious college in equally unprestgious small college town.  Clever and geeky, Claire never expected to fit in with the in-crowd of fashionable and popular girls but when she inadvertently makes an enemy of the clique’s leader Monica, she had no idea how bad things would get. 

Unable to stay in the dorm, Claire looks for off-campus accommodation and answers an advert in the paper for a room-to-let in a creepy old shared house.  Accepted into the house, she finally feels like she is making some real friends, even if they are a little odd.

Firstly, there is Michael the owner of the house, he’s only eighteen and a complete night owl.  In fact, nobody has ever seen him during the day.  Ever. 

Eve, a Goth girl who works at the local coffee shop and is a fellow roommate in the Glass House swears that Michael’s okay and is not a vampire and she would know because she’s checked….  Although, she also claims that Morganville is a town run by vampires, so she could just be crazy.

Finally, there is Shane.  He’s eighteen and although he doesn’t seem to do anything much all day apart from make chilli and kill zombies whilst playing computer games, Claire thinks he’s totally cool.

Her new roommates are the best thing about living in Morganville because, as it turns out, Eve isn’t crazy and the town is run by vampires.  In Morganville you have two choices - you either work for the vampires and have their protection or you are fair game.

When Monica says she’s going to see Claire dead, she really means it.  Luckily Claire’s new friends have her back and they hatch a plan to deal with the vampires and help her stay alive. 

However, Morganville is a town full of secrets and some of the roommates have secrets of their own…




I liked this book. I didn't love it, but I will definitely invest in getting the rest of them (mainly because of the HUGE cliffhanger at the end, but I'll get to that later.) It fulfilled all my expectations of it, being a fun, relatively easy to read book with loads of fast-paced action and a couple of sweet underlying romances (I love Eve and Michael), and the vampires were interesting too.


Claire was an OK character, but I didn't fall in love with her, and for a teen genius, she did a lot of stupid things. I liked the fact that she didn't always have someone around to protect her (although Shane...) and that most of the time when she got hurt she only had herself to blame for it and not everybody was doting over her when she got a tiny scratch or whatever, cause that kinda annoys me in books. But it was a bit annoying when  even though she'd done A LOT of damage that nobody got pissed off with her. I mean she literally, albeit unknowingly, led a load of vampires to their house, which  then wrecked the house, nearly got everyone killed ect. But she did feel plenty enough guilty about it at the time though, so I guess it's okay...


I thought the vampires were good, as they actually wanted to kill people and all y'know, and as a kid who's watched Buffy since she was five, that's what you want in a vampire novel. And I thought it was interesting how they completely ran the the town of Morganville, and that tax was paid in blood donations, and that two percent of the college students got eaten, and the whole protection thing, as I said, interesting.


Monica was kind of unbelievable though, for me, because even if you were a psycho, you don't just go around pushing people down stairs because they said that World War Two wasn't some Chinese thing. Or burning down someone's house because you have a crush on them (Monica, we all know you said you didn't like him, but we know the truth.)


The plot was good, but quite busy as there was a new plot element like every twenty pages, but it did keep me reading, and the rest of the cast were cool and I can't wait to read the other books and see how they develop, and how the plot develops, and to see if in their reviews I use the word 'and' quite as much.


Anyway, I give this book four stars. It was a good, enjoyable read, which kept me going, but didn't blow me away. Though I will definitely get the rest of the series.=)