“I wondered if I would remember this feeling after Catherine. The feeling of seeing a friend—someone I knew and who knew me, too, someone who cared about me—walking in through a door or waving from across a hall or bending to whisper in another friend’s ear. Of being inside, so inside, such an intimacy, and at the same time seeing it from outside. A feeling of being seen, beautiful and young, seated at a mythic table.”
Catherine House, By Elisabeth Thomas
Summary
Catherine House is a school of higher learning like no other. Hidden deep in the woods of rural Pennsylvania, this crucible of reformist liberal arts study with its experimental curriculum, wildly selective admissions policy, and formidable endowment, has produced some of the world’s best minds: prize-winning authors, artists, inventors, Supreme Court justices, presidents. For those lucky few selected, tuition, room, and board are free. But acceptance comes with a price. Students are required to give the House three years—summers included—completely removed from the outside world. Family, friends, television, music, even their clothing must be left behind. In return, the school promises a future of sublime power and prestige, and that its graduates can become anything or anyone they desire.
Among this year’s incoming class is Ines Murillo, who expects to trade blurry nights of parties, pills, cruel friends, and dangerous men for rigorous intellectual discipline—only to discover an environment of sanctioned revelry. Even the school’s enigmatic director, Viktória, encourages the students to explore, to expand their minds, to find themselves within the formidable iron gates of Catherine. For Ines, it is the closest thing to a home she’s ever had. But the House’s strange protocols soon make this refuge, with its worn velvet and weathered leather, feel increasingly like a gilded prison. And when tragedy strikes, Ines begins to suspect that the school—in all its shabby splendor, hallowed history, advanced theories, and controlled decadence—might be hiding a dangerous agenda within the secretive, tightly knit group of students selected to study its most promising and mysterious curriculum.
My Thoughts
Catherine House took me a while to properly get into; in the end, the only reason I really finished the book was because it was the only one downloaded on my Kindle on a six-hour train ride from Toronto to Montreal over spring break. However, I’m so glad that happened—I loved the book. My real recommendation is that you try to read it in one sitting. Suspense is a huge part of Catherine House, but because of that, it is an incredibly slow book. It goes through the main character, Ines’s, three years at the elite school Catherine House, and while a lot of plot points are dropped throughout the book, none of them really come to fruition until the very end, when Ines has her Bluebeard moment and discovers what is behind Catherine’s locked doors.
Catherine House is an excellent book. It’s slow to pick up, and many of the characters other than our main character Ines can seem vague and not fully formed at times, but by the end of the book her best friends are well-written characters in their own right and the book ends one of the ways I love, vaguely and with unknowns for the future. It’s a gothic mystery at its core in a dark academia setting, and I love literally all of those pieces. The real thing to understand about this book is that Ines is an unreliable narrator—very unreliable, and she herself acknowledges that a lot of the time she doesn’t notice what is going on around her. It limits the perspective of the book and what we learn about the world and Catherine, but it also adds some interest because Ines is unreliable enough that it adds to the suspense of the book. We are just as confused as Ines is; there is no objectivity.
I have complicated feelings about the book; it’s not the best book in the world, but I really loved the concept and how the book ended. My big gripe is just that the book is very slow, and the suspense takes a while to really set in and pick up. I usually don’t mind a lack of plot if there is a focus on character, but the book doesn’t have that either; it’s plot and character focused, oddly enough, but the plot kind of meanders in the background for a solid portion of the book while we focus on our main characters, and then all of a sudden plot takes the forefront and the characterization from before becomes really important. Not the best pacing, but this is Elisabeth Thomas’s first book. It being me, I did make a pinterest board.
Review: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/blabalnblaba/aes-literature/catherine-house-elisabeth-thomas/
Niharika Agrawal 