Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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45 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A good book for the right age group but a disappointment for us "grown ups", 13 Oct 2006
I love Rachel Caine's Weather Warden series and was keen to read this, the first in a new series subtitled "The Morganville Vampires". However, this book is VERY different from the Weather Warden series - our heroine is a 16 year old girl going off to College. As an English woman the American college system seems very bizarre at the best of times but Claire's experiences in her first six weeks at her new college in Morganville are even stranger. She's a bit of a brainy nerd and pretty soon falls foul of Monica, the 'cool but dim' girl who, with her acolytes, virtually runs the college. They gang up against Claire and, in order to escape various attempts to harm her, some successful, Claire moves out and starts living in an old house with two young men, Shane and Michael, and a goth girl, Eve. Once there she begins to find out some very strange things about the town of Morganville, its residents and the rules that she needs to know to be protected from the evil things out there.
Claire's discoveries of the strange events that take place in Morganville unfold through the course of the book - she discovers vampires, ghosts, a long-lost secret book - whilst having to deal with injuries, a crush on one of the young men in her house and her parents' protectiveness.
The book moves along fairly swiftly and it's interesting and well-written but I can't give it more than three stars because, for me, it was unsatisfying as it was more a book for teenagers. I'm over twice Claire's age and I just can't identify with her - or even with the setting of the college and the events taking place there. Probably it's great fun for young adults who are interested in the vampire genre but don't want anything too gory or too full of sex. I expected another novel like the Weather Warden series for adults and the information on the book's cover didn't warn me otherwise.
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46 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Courtesy of Teens Read Too, 30 Nov 2006
All Claire Danvers wanted was a normal college experience. Preferably somewhere far away, but when her parents send her to Morganville, Texas, she's still glad to be going to college, even if she is, at sixteen, the youngest college student around. Morganville is a small college town, and Claire's prepared to make the best of her fresh start. Unfortunately, things don't turn out the way anyone expected or wanted them to.
At first, Claire's existence is made miserable by a few girls in her dorm who torment her. Dorm life, for Claire, is not all it's cracked up to be--in fact, it's pretty much as miserable as she thinks it can get, so Claire decides to move out and find a place off-campus. Luck is with her; she ends up at a spooky-looking mansion with a room she can actually afford, and three roommates who actually turn out to be pretty cool, even if they have reservations about letting her move in at first. Michael, Shane, and Eve are all eighteen, and Claire's a couple of years younger.
If Claire thought being harassed in her dorm was bad, she didn't know Morganville's secrets. When she moves out of the dorm, however, she learns that there's more to Morganville than there seems to be. The town is run by vampires. Yes, actual vampires that can't go out in the daytime and drink human blood at night. If Claire's not careful, it could end up being her blood they're drinking...
GLASS HOUSES is a great book for fans of vampire novels. Claire and her roommates are quite likeable as characters, and, perhaps making the book even better, the bad guys are just as easy to hate as the inhabitants of the Glass House are to like. In Morganville, Rachel Caine has created a mysterious, intriguing, and spooky town run by the undead (I was a bit
reminded of Buffy's hometown of Sunnydale). The writing is great, and there are few flaws in this awesome book.
Claire doesn't ask nearly as many questions as might be expected of someone who had just been let in on the secret that she's living in a town run by vampires; it seems like that might be a way of keeping some questions and suspense in the story, but it struck me as a bit unrealistic while reading. Even with its minor flaws, though, this is a book that will have readers hooked and ready for more in this series!
Reviewed by: Jocelyn Pearce
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35 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Teenage fiction not adult fiction, 3 Nov 2006
I bought this book because I really enjoyed Rachel Caine's Firewarden series. This book is aimed at teenagers not adults and I'm not surprised another reviewer had the same problems I did.
Amazon please don't list this as adult fiction it isn't!
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