Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas

Hello Booklovers,


This is a book I've been anticipating for months so I was very excited to receive an arc from Harper Collins via Netgalley for an honest review.  My head is still spinning after this read.

the story takes place in 1996 and follows Ines, a student with nowhere else to go who was accepted into the highly selective and pretentious Catherine House. The school is free and provides room and board as well as meals and wardrobe. One of the rules when entering Catherine House is that for 3 full years you must completely leave your old life behind. Classes are year round with no breaks to visit home. Talk of past lives and experiences is forbidden as is contact with family and old friends. Though they advertise that students will always be able to contact their families and friends via phone no one ever seems to earn enough points to have outside world contact. Bringing in outside belongings is forbidden though trucks deliver items several times a week and students can earn points towards purchasing these items via on campus jobs.

We follow Ines who has come to Catherine House because she has no where else to go. She barely graduated high school, she and her mother never had much of a relationship, and she's running from an incident in her past.

In some ways it's like an ordinary college. Ines and her group of friends love to drink, party, and have random hookups with both men and women. While I was never a huge participant in that world I know that experience is very common for most college aged young adults.

Ines struggles mentally and has a hard time adapting to Catherine's House's environment. At first they barely feed the freshman  and have them participate in some strange cult like rituals. She has no motivation to attend or even do well in her classes. It gets to the point that the school's director Viktoria schedules a meeting with her and sends her to a facility they call The Tower. The Tower is a prison like facility where students are stripped of their clothes and sent to live in a small room for days on end with just a few books and some playing cards. It's supposed to be a place to reflect and get back on track. While in this confinement the students are given sessions with plasm pins. No one is quite sure what plasm is exactly or how it works but the university has had past scandals involving it.

I found this story overall compelling however I think it would've worked better as a short story. At times I felt their was a little too much description of random events that happened during Ines' day to day life that were not essential to the plot. There were times while reading I felt like I was really understanding Ines and her friends and then other times I felt like I barely knew them at all. Sometimes I forgot about the strange things that were happening at the school because the focus was on grand feasts and the sexually fluid teen hookups.  If this was a novella it would've made for a tighter plot.

That being said there was something so endearing about Catherine House that made me continue reading and resonated with me long after it ended.

The way Elisabeth Thomas writes this story in small vignettes is also not a style for everyone. One minute you're enthralled in the creepy rituals  the students are partaking in while the next your thrust into a campus party full of drunken debauchery or a campus fun fair complete with rides and cotton candy.

It does what it's entailed to do by reminding you of what college promises you, how it feels like such a magical time, and how looking back on that time as an adult in the real world you realize how oblivious you were. And in the end the story comes together and makes sense. Despite not having all my questions answered I felt satisfied.