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Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas
(releasing 5/12/20 from Custom House) |
I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.
I really wanted to like this one, but it lacked a true climax and left me with a lot of unanswered questions. Students spend 3 years at a remote college completely separated from the outside world in exchange for a future full of "sublime power and prestige." Catherine House boasts "prize-winning authors, artists, inventors, Supreme Court justices, [and] presidents" as their alumni, which made me think the story would be filled with tales of secret society and initiation rights, but not exactly.
***Spoilers Ahead****
The students are all gathered to have scientific equipment attached to them while they chant, they have almost no rules and act as college students tend to do (drinking, sex, skipping class), and their curriculum doesn't seem to follow any sort of logical trajectory. There is a subset of students studying a "new material" called "plasm" and while I thought this would be the big reveal (after 200 pages of teasing), its final description is vague. I lost all hope that there would be any big shocks when the main character trespasses to obtain more information about what is going on in the top secret lab. Her lack of reactions during (she finds some shocking evidence of the team's experiments) and after this act (just goes about her days like normal) were puzzling, but her punishment brought to mind Scientology processes for reformation. There are definitely similar themes to Kazuo Ishiguro’s
Never Let Me Go, but this one didn't even pack a fraction of the shock value or humanity of that novel. Two additional notes, there are endless descriptions of food and meals that I thought would eventually have a point or metaphorical explanation but did not, also the ending is the type of ending I hate. It wasn't the "it was all a dream" explanation for everything but it was pretty close.
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