Glass Houses by Rachel Caine
Nov. 7th, 2009 08:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
slowfoxI really didn't have high hopes for this one, but y'know what? It's actually a lot of fun.
We follow teeny-tiny-brainy Claire, who at sixteen has headed off to (a not particularly distinguished) college in smalltown Texas, Morganville. However, she immediately runs into trouble in the form of Monica who, with the help of her cronies, makes dorm-life unliveable for our heroine, so she sets offto seek her fortune to try living off-campus, responding to an ad in the paper.
This is how she meets up with sleep-by-day Michael, goth-coffee-bar-waitress Eve and slacker-with-tortured-angst-backstory Shane. And she learns that the entire town is in the grip of vampires, and this causes problems for everyone.
As it so happens, the vamps need to find a book, and have set their tame populace questing for said tome. To be fair to the author, the reasoning behind the book's existence and its value isn't too shabby, although the information it contains surely can't be the only record on the planet. But it's more than passable as the plot set-up, so I won't over-quibble.
Claire is clearly one of those 'confluence of events' people about which plots weave implausibly intricate and coincidental paths, but if she lived an ordinary life, we wouldn't be reading about her, would we?
Overall, I liked it, for YA teen-girl vampire fiction (I so need to start getting my books delivered in plain brown paper wrapping): I prefer it to Twiglet, would say it's easily on a par with Tate Hallaway's Garnet Lacey books, and was as absorbed in it as I have been with the Sook.
So, yeah, overall, a lot more fun than I was anticipating, and I'm going to try and borrow Books 2 and 3 to see how the series runs...
We follow teeny-tiny-brainy Claire, who at sixteen has headed off to (a not particularly distinguished) college in smalltown Texas, Morganville. However, she immediately runs into trouble in the form of Monica who, with the help of her cronies, makes dorm-life unliveable for our heroine, so she sets off
This is how she meets up with sleep-by-day Michael, goth-coffee-bar-waitress Eve and slacker-with-tortured-angst-backstory Shane. And she learns that the entire town is in the grip of vampires, and this causes problems for everyone.
As it so happens, the vamps need to find a book, and have set their tame populace questing for said tome. To be fair to the author, the reasoning behind the book's existence and its value isn't too shabby, although the information it contains surely can't be the only record on the planet. But it's more than passable as the plot set-up, so I won't over-quibble.
Claire is clearly one of those 'confluence of events' people about which plots weave implausibly intricate and coincidental paths, but if she lived an ordinary life, we wouldn't be reading about her, would we?
Overall, I liked it, for YA teen-girl vampire fiction (I so need to start getting my books delivered in plain brown paper wrapping): I prefer it to Twiglet, would say it's easily on a par with Tate Hallaway's Garnet Lacey books, and was as absorbed in it as I have been with the Sook.
So, yeah, overall, a lot more fun than I was anticipating, and I'm going to try and borrow Books 2 and 3 to see how the series runs...
no subject
Date: 2009-11-08 05:30 pm (UTC)