Glass House (Morganville Vampires, Book 1) by Rachel Caine

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Summary: A college student and her housemates deal with vampire politics and death threats in a small Texas town.


There's a phrase in the romance review world called TSTL. It translates as Too Stupid To Live. It often refers to the heroine who keeps running into danger and then expects the hero to rescue her, although why anyone could be attracted to anyone so stupid, no one knows. I didn't expect the teen heroine of a vampire novel to fall into the TSTL category, but she does.


Child prodigy Claire Danvers (great name, by the way) simply must go to college because she lives to study. She'd rather be studying than anything. So Claire's parents send their sixteen-year-old daughter to get her associate's degree in the small Texas town of Morganville. But Claire doesn't fit in at TPU and is too scared by her classmate Monica to go to class. But when nasty Monica and her hangers-on carry their malicious pranks too far, Claire is scared for her life.


Instead of transferring, or leaving the college, or going to any faculty or administrator, or telling her parents, sixteen-year-old Claire decides to just move off campus. 


Claire doesn't know that if she moves off campus, she's considered available for any vampire to control or drain. Her roommate's a ghost (he was incompletely killed by a vampire and became a ghost instead of a vampire), one roommate's a Goth girl, and one roommate is her new crush, but he's haunted because the vampires killed his mother. 


If the writing wasn't so good, I would have stopped reading long ago. The writing is clear, expressive, and realistic, even if the plot is not. 

She always wondered how in the hell anybody could be stupid enough to open up a door to the scary bad thing in the movies, but now she knew. She absolutely knew.

Sometimes, you didn’t have a choice.

Eve was gasping for breath and crying furiously in between. “I hate this,” she said, and slammed her hand into the hard plastic steering wheel, over and over. “I hate this town! I hate them!”

So leave already!

Great writing, but this book was too full of stupid people who make choices only to move the plot along instead of acting in a way that makes sense.