Catherine House

Today's post is on Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas. It is 311 pages long and is published by Custom House. The cover is a close-up of a gate. The intended reader is someone who likes speculative fiction mixed with horror. There is mild foul language, sex and sexuality and no violence in this novel. The story is told from first person close of the main character, Ines. There Be Spoilers Ahead. 

From the dust jacket- 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 its graduates a future of sublime power and prestige, and that they can become anything or anyone they desire.
Among this year’s incoming class is Ines, 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. The school’s enigmatic director, Viktória, encourages the students to explore, to expand their minds, to find themselves and their place within the formidable black iron gates of Catherine.
For Ines, Catherine is the closest thing to a home she’s ever had, and her serious, timid roommate, Baby, soon becomes an unlikely friend. Yet the House’s strange protocols make this refuge, with its worn velvet and weathered leather, feel increasingly like a gilded prison. And when Baby’s obsessive desire for acceptance ends in tragedy, 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 that is connected to a secretive, tightly knit group of students selected to study its most promising and mysterious curriculum.

Review- An interesting speculative fiction novel that leads nowhere in the end. Ines is on the run from everything, her mother, her old school, and from the hotel room with a dead girl in it. All she wants to is disappear and she hopes that Catherine House can help her do that. But Catherine has it's dark secrets and they include Ines. This novel follows Ines during all three years of her time at Catherine and all the oddness that she witnesses there. But in the end the reader does not really learn anything about what is really going on at Catherine and what the end goals are. Lots of mystery but little payoff in the end, which to be fair is what Ines has in the end too, mysteries and no answers. If that sounds appealing to you, then you should try this novel. But if you like more hard resolutions, then give this novel a pass. 

I give this novel a Three out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this novel from my local library.