A supernatural, mythical adventure story set in the outback of Australia – present day. It involves Sam, an American journalist, her photographer Marc, James, a scientist and his Maori friend Spence and two young Aboriginals, Nathan and Ratana. Entwined in Aboriginal lore, scientific discovery and supernatural events they all become enlisted in a "Quest".

Characters
Real and uncompromising. A mixed group in both ethnicity, personality and racial attitude. A nominal hero and heroine who do not dominate the story. A lot of observation and experience has obviously been used when describing each character as they appear. The various mythical beasts have also been well researched.

Plot
A good adventure into different areas of mythology, science fiction and fact. It is exciting, compelling and most unusual.

General
An excitingly different book. Very philosophical in places but moves along steadily. The reader is left unsure as to whether the plot is partially biographical with the addition of some fictional events or whether the author has cleverly contrived this as a "twist" to the storyline. The epilogue compounds this idea and compels the reader to continue on to book 2 of the trilogy.

The first volume of the Looking Glass Trilogy, 'Glass House' is a well-written tale of Australian myth and bush adventure. The story start off with the discovery of a large black monolith, rather reminiscent of that found in 2001, in the middle of the Australian outback. Circumstances result in an apparently mismatched group, including a Maori tracker, an American journalist, an archaeologist and an extremely irritating English treasure hunter, setting off into the bush to discover the origin of the monolith.

This story could have deteriorated into a tale of "Space Odyssey meets Indiana Jones" but Ariana Overton manages to avoid the obvious clichés and produces a well-written compelling novel.

This is a book that combines Australian Aboriginal, Maori, Native american myths and spiritualism with UFO's, conspiracies, yetis & other mythical creatures and even neanderthal man into one book and yet manages to do it in a manner that is not confusing or disjointed. That's not bad going!

The lead character, Dr. James Hay, is a part aboriginal archaeologist working on an myterious ancient site in Australia. Mysterious because of the black stone object they discover. The markings on the stone (including Dr. Hay's horse totem), and the words of the aborigine elders lead Hay and his group to undertake an expedition into the Glass House mountains.

To tell anymore would give away too much of the plot of this book and I wouldn't want to put you off reading it. This is the first in the author's Glass House Trilogy and it sets up the series very well, and not to the detriment of this volume. This book, if the author was less skilled than she is, would be incomprehensible with the sheer amount of strands that she is threading together, but it works well, and leaves the reader quite satisfied with the book as a whole.

The downside for me is one character, Guilford King, an English archaeologist/treasure hunter. He is portrayed as a pompous, shoot-it-first-identify-it-later, arrogant, blundering fool, the very over-the-top worst incarnation of the Englishman adventurer. The only problem with this is that I am an Englishman and it did grate a little, but if that is the worst criticism I can find for this book then you should give it a try (if you aren't English you may even enjoy the character).