I received an ARC of this book, and this is my honest review.
I was excited about the opportunity to read Catherine House. There seemed to be a lot of hype surrounding this debut novel by Elisabeth Thomas, and I love a Gothic story.
Catherine House details the college career of Ines, a troubled teen accepted into the elite and renowned Catherine House for an accelerated three-year degree path, strictly isolated from the rest of the world but also completely free of charge. Ines and her cohort of friends indulge in school-sanctioned parties replete with frat-style binge drinking and indiscriminate sexual liaisons while negotiating ultra-challenging academic work and aspiring to the New Materials concentration, a coveted discipline studying plasm, the nebulous substance interconnecting all things. All of this is fascinating given the overall theme of isolation.
There are elements of Catherine House that I really enjoyed: the characters are interesting, flawed and broken. The house itself becomes a character, which is a device I have a particular affinity for. I was genuinely surprised by the ending. And, the novel reminds me a lot of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, a novel that has haunted me since I read it about 11 years ago.
However, on balance the book fell flat for me. Ines's mysterious past has a lot of holes. I felt I needed more of them filled so that I could understand her more fully. I simply could not relate to her incredibly sad antipathy and, because of that, I wasn't sure how much I cared about her. And, I really wanted to care for her because it seemed that so few people in her life did.
The mom part of me was angry at the lack of rules and boundaries for the students' social lives, and while I appreciated part of Catherine House's ethos is the mind-freeing nature of not having imposed rules and boundaries, the resultant free-for-all of behavior was concerning to me. Real colleges and universities have rules and boundaries for interpersonal behavior and resources for handling the ups and downs. Further, the cultish school culture is very concerning in large part because there appears to be very little outsider concern about the students at Catherine House.
I can definitely see the draw the book might have for other readers; it just didn't wow me. I appreciate the underlying themes: isolation, withdrawal, brokenness, scientific advancement (at what cost) are important and relevant discussions. But, I needed more.
Overall, I rate Catherine House 3/5 stars.
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