Glass Houses - Rachel Caine

Sixteen-year-old Claire Danvers is away at college for the first time. It was always going to be hard - a prodigy, she's never really fitted in - but her parent's insistence that she not go too far from home means that instead of going to MIT, CalTech or an Ivy League school that may have had the insight and facilities to support her, Claire's wound up at Texas Prairie University, a nowhere college in the strange, hick town of Morganville, and she's the target of Monica, a particularly bitchy girl and her side-kicks.
Desperate to get away from the dorms, and genuinely frightened for her life, Claire answers an ad for a share house, and discovers a whole new world. Morganville's home to a whole lot of vampires, and the human are divided into the Protected and the unprotected. And Claire's not protected; Monica could well be the least of her problems.
Glass Houses is the first in a new series by Caine, whose Weather Warden series has been reviewed previously (including the two reviews below this). It's therefore not surprising that much of the book is focused on world building; though not at the expense of plot (which is pacy), and characterisation, a little logic is sacrificed. The main narrative thrust is that Claire had to go to a second- (or even third) rate college because her parents didn't want her to be too far from home. But Morganville's 100 miles from home, which isn't exactly next door, and it's no Texas university. The novel emphasises that Claire's father has always been goal-oriented, sometimes over Claire's best interests, so it doesn't make sense that she's been pushed to excel (albeit aided by a stunning intellect) but that he's then prepared to have her held back when it really counts. Sure, she can transfer two years in, but even so there's more to the undergraduate college experience than academics. And if her dad doesn't want her to go to a party school there were any number of way better choices. I grant you that, as logical loop holes go, this isn't huge, but it continued to irritate me every time there was any reference to Claire's parent's overprotectiveness.
The main characters - Claire and her new roomies, Goth Eve, enigmatic Michael and hunky Shane - are well drawn, believable, and involving, and the plot's original and interesting. The first novel ends on a gripping hook, but I'm being more selective about what I buy, so unless it falls in my lap or my local library buys it, I won't be reading the sequel, The Dead Girl's Dance any time soon. - Alex