This is one of the worst books I’ve read in recent memory. The pacing is strange, I kept forgetting it was the 90s and had very little sense of the passage of time. The characters aren’t supposed to talk about the past so it’s hard to feel connected to them. The main character’s motivations make little sense to me, the plot is shaky, the dialogue veered into the unbelievable. What the author chose to go into detail about confused me, and I couldn’t ever imagine the house itself. I couldn’t get grounded in the people, place or time… so why did I finish? No idea. I just wanted something spooky. 

this book was perfectly fine but nothing spectacular.  while I like descriptive language, I thought Elisabeth Thomas overused it here.  I do not care what these kids ate for every single meal, I'm sorry.  I also thought the eeriness could have been ramped up a notch.  this book is not scary, not very creepy, and not at all suspenseful (in my opinion).  Storygraph calls this a "thriller," which is weird seeing as there is nothing thrilling about this book.  Ines just kind of goes about her life at this secluded, insular small college, goes to class, sleeps around, is depressed, and gets drunk.  she is very much a passive protagonist, which I don't mind that much but I can see where that gets very frustrating.  she just kind of lets things happen to her in the way that a lot of numb 18 year olds do.

in many ways, Catherine House reminded me of The Idiot, one of my favorite reads of this year.  no plot, just vibes.  passive main character.  the plot: mentally ill (and slightly delusional) mc goes to elite college.  both set in the mid 1990s, although that was more apparent to me in ~vibe~ in The Idiot than in Catherine House.  however, I LOVED The Idiot and thought this was just okay, and I think part of that is that the satire and humor in Batuman's writing was sorely missing here.  Thomas failed to really make any sort of critique of academia and I couldn't really find the point in the book.  you could say that The Idiot is the light academia version of this supposedly dark academia book.

anywho, I didn't care about the "mystery" and was not impressed by the reveals, which could have been much creepier.  I don't really see anything majorly wrong with the book per se, but I certainly didn't love it.

Okay, I can see how many people wouldn't like this book...but it worked for me! It reminded me a LOT of Vita Nostra by Marina & Sergey Dyachenko. I never thought I'd come across anything that resembled that book. In both novels, the school doesn't serve as aesthetically pleasing "dark academia" fodder - it's a hellish trap that sucks the life out of its students and attempts to transform them into something otherworldly. We follow a passive student as she progresses in her (barely comprehensible) studies, unraveling the school's secrets and trying not to lose herself along the way.

The story is slow-paced and the characters' daily lives feel almost "empty"; all the creepy stuff happens in the background while the protagonist mostly floats on by...until things get too hard to ignore. There is a heavy gothic atmosphere and while we do get dreamy days wandering the school grounds, the students here are desperate, all trying to escape their own lives within Catherine's walls. I'm torn on whether all the snippets of Ines and her friends were necessary. I loved Yaya, though.

The ending is vague so I'll just headcanon that Ines truly shakes free of Catherine and finds happiness in the outside world. She reunites with Yaya in New York, I just know it!!!

Catherine House is a haunting look at how people can hold immense loyalty for an institution that may not deserve such devotion. And yet, somehow it's also a love letter to one's university days, an understanding of the nostalgia. Give it a chance if "slow and depressing" doesn't put you off 😆

I wanted to like this and I was so excited to read a good dark academia thriller but omg honestly....this is NOT dark academia. It takes places in a school where weird (and sometimes bad?? but only sometimes, like maybe twice) things happen, but there is no atmosphere, no *vibes* that make it dark academia ok. Dark academia is all about the VIBES. So many actions by the characters that make no sense, so much dead space where the characters are doing literally nothing (except I guess drinking and ??? that's about it??). This book really dragged, and there was no fun atmosphere or spooky vibes to even make up for it. I ended up skimming most of the middle section, and by the time I got to the end, the "reveal" didn't do much for me, and the ending was too quick and neat. The whole social message about education fell flat as well - I GET what the author was trying to do but the execution was just too boring and messy and underwhelming. 

why did they let Yaya visit Ines in the Tower?? does this mean Ines could have visited Baby at any point during her stay there?? what was honestly the real danger/threat to the characters, someone pls tell me

 

The premise is very cool, I love dark academia books, but the pacing was very slow, and I didn't get a good sense of the characters (the MC has a group of friends, but it all felt very one-note). I also could not stand the protagonist (Ines); she was just so apathetic and not in an interesting way, she was just dull. The main thing about her is how stunningly beautiful she was (except her teeth lol??); like that's the only thing anyone ever said about her, that and how lazy she is. I think I would have liked the book more if it hadn't been so slow and if I actually liked the protagonist. Also I just did not understand a huge chunk of the book, which I think affected my rating

I still have no idea wtf plasm is, is it like stem cells or something? I just did not understand, I would have liked more info on it. I also do not understand when Theo betrayed Ines, there's just so much of it that didn't make sense.

This book was amazing. It hooked me at the beginning with its description of Ines' mental health issues and her academic troubles, that was like getting punched by a reflection. The descriptions are amazing, the vibe is immaculate and the suspense was great. At a few points I wasn't really sure she was going to make it, still don't know if she did at the end, but I choose to think she won. 

 
Catherine House is a gothic fever-dream set in an isolated school with dark secrets. Not my typical read but I picked it up due to one of my reading challenges. I struggled to connect with the story. My interest was piqued for a while and then tapered off, partly because I seem to have little tolerance for characters who self-sabotage and drift or escape in a sea of booze and sex. A little too much happened off page or wasn’t explained fully, leaving me slightly frustrated - I still want to know what happened to Ines before she arrived at Catherine House.

So not a bad book but not the book for me. But the dark atmosphere was spot on and if gothic is your thing then give this book a go.
 

This book sort of lost the plot while it was off creating AmbianceTM. Perhaps it's part of the point, but there are huge swaths of the book that are largely unmemorable as they just involve Ines wandering around the house as other students are doing random, unimportant things or Ines herself doing random, unimportant things. The protagonist is fairly boring as she has absolutely no motivations for doing anything other than a little bit towards the end

, and the resulting actions result in her being completely removed and preclude her taking any further action

. If any of the revelations in this book were meant to be twists, they were very easy to spot in advance and were therefore not at all surprising.

Something this book failed to convince me of was that the antagonists' motives were bad.

Obviously the main thing is that Ines didn't want to become part of the experiment and so their desire to keep her prisoner was bad, but the parts about human experimentation and the extension of life were painted as part of Catherine's innate twisted wrongness despite the fact that the previous subjects were willing. I suppose it could be up for debate whether they knew what they were getting themselves into, but for Baby any potential complications were likely to have been immaterial. It isn't clear if it is inevitable that anyone they experiment on is doomed to become an empty shell or if further experimentation could yield something closer to true immortality. My feeling is that the author meant for us to assume the former, but from what is on the page I am less sure.

My favorite things about this book were the worldbuilding around the house. Thomas did a very good job of creating a place that was simultaneously blooming and rotting, beautiful and abhorrent. Something that looks perfect, but ever so slightly akilter. I also appeciate the very casual existence of a bisexual protagonist.