Fortnight of Guests: Supernatural Book Club (Book Review)

Greetings book fans! I'm Heather, also known as "Hey Lady!" from "Supernatural Book Club", which is a book review site and an actual book club that meets once a month to discuss a book we're reading and choose another. We're located in Texas, but anyone can read along with us and join in the discussion by stopping by our blog. Thanks so much to Megan at "The Book Addicted Girl" for having me here, I've enjoyed her site for a while and it's an honor to share a review!

 Glass Houses by Rachel Caine

This is the first book in the Morganville Vampire Series*

Summary: Claire Danvers is dealing with the stress of moving out of her parents house and living away from home. Claire is something of a prodigy, she is sixteen years old and already a college freshman. While Claire excels intellectual matters, she suffers in social skills and street smarts, leaving her painfully shy and out of her element at a new school, in a new town. And Morganville is no ordinary town. As Claire struggles to make her way in this new place she slowly begins to see that the people of Morganville are not what they seem. Being two years younger than the other college freshman, dorm life is already a struggle, but when the dorm's most popular girl focuses her wrath on Claire, life becomes unbearable. After being pushed down the stairs, Claire realizing that dorm life is just too dangerous and goes looking for somewhere else to live. Luckily for her, she sees a girl hanging up flier looking for a roommate, and she soon finds sanctuary at the house of Michael Glass and his two roommates, Eve and Shane. Once she moves into the Glass house, Claire learns that there is no human law in Morganville, that vampires control everything and everyone. The town is full of humans frightened into obedience and submission, and Claire and her roommates are not ready to obey.

Review: I originally read this book looking for something new and different, what I got was a simple, easy to read, fairly short adventure that immediatly made me want to buy the next book in the series. There are so many young adult books about teenagers in high school with vampire and human romance. Glass Houses is a nice change from that. To start with the book taking place in college, not high school. The vampire aren't persecuted, misunderstood creatures, they're powerful tyrants. The story being told through Claire's eyes makes it easy to relate to being a shy teenager (which I was), which is different from so many stories in which the main character is well-liked and popular (see Elena from the Vampire Diaries and Bella from the Twilight Saga). Through Claire we feel our way through strange and frightening new experiences, from dorm bullies, to oppressive vampires, to her first romantic encounters. It's a fun and quick read, I recommend giving it a try.

Bottom line: This book is truly a young adult novel in that it has very little sexual context or violence, as in, almost none. The book still manages to be entertaining without those elements. I give it a B.

*On a side note, for fans of the Morganville Vampire series, there's short story about how Eve and Michael's met in the anthology "Many Bloody Returns". It's the reason I picked up this series.

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Oh, I have to read this soon!  I've been meaning to for ages.  Thanks for the review, Heather!