Glass Houses by Rachel Caine
My friend, also being a lover of vampire books, lent me Rachel Caine’s new YA offering this week. It is a good YA novel with some of the usual teen problems and, of course, some vampires. Claire is young genius who graduated from high school early and is attending a university in dusty west Texas. She is not well liked, but eventually finds some friends and they have subsequent adventures in which they get in trouble with some vampires. It is a very fast, very fun read.
However, and boy is this a big however. I have a huge bone to pick with Ms. Caine. This is the first book of hers I have read and apparently she likes to end her books with huge cliff hangers. Knife-arching-down-to-kill-a-character kind of ending. The previous sentence is exactly how the book ended. Dear readers, would I joke about this? I think not.
It left me feeling dirty, taken advantage of. I do not mind loose ends, the way Rowling leaves loose ends, but this is over the top for me. Was it so hard to figure out what was going to happen next that Ms. Caine just had to stop or is this a ploy to get people to buy more books?
Regardless, I liked the book but will only finish reading the series if I can borrow it from the library or my friend, whom I already chastised. It is good, but I did not need the cheap ploy to get me interested in the series. The story would have been enough.
Recommended: Good Story, fun for all (for parents, it does have some very light cussing, but nothing that would make your wee one’s eyes spin and nothing they can not already hear on TV).