um...?

elisabeth thomas' debut is a dark academia thriller set in 1990s pennsylvania about a prestigious but mysterious college called catherine house, specializing in experimentation regarding an obscure new material, plasma. the only catch is that catherine demands three full years of complete isolation inside its vast campus, from the first day of term till graduation day, completely cut off from the rest of the world. this feels like a perfect getaway for protagonist ines, who is clearly running from some ominous past, and thus goes with the seclusion of catherine and outwardly asks nothing more of it except to be allowed to remain separated from the real world.

i found this book to be okay. it started slow with its introduction to the world, but i found thomas' prose interesting and felt like the cult-like catherine with the more sci-fi? speculative? experimentation with "plasma" was a welcome change from the typical dark academia niche. i suppose most of my problems come from the fact that, maybe, the prose is a little too effectve. our point of view character for the whole story is ines, a character who is supposed to be detached, mysterious and doesn't care for much, a girl who has resigned herself to simply existing as if floating in a pool forever. for the most part, i think the choice was adequate for the type of person, in-story, that catherine house purposely seeks out for its student body: you need someone who doesn't have much going in life to indoctrinate them into a cult, and it tracks that ines would find herself a little seduced by the promise to exist in this dream-like state.

ines is observant but fragmentary, focusing on tiny, little details amidst the hazy days she spends half-drunk from wine, sleeping around and hanging out with the other students in her dorm and her anxious roommate, baby. the days bleed into one another, going to classes with senseless curriculums and roaming the hallways of the building. again, on a story-level, i think this is effective for what catherine probably wants of its students to experience, and for me it was an atompsheric, almost immersive read. it's easy to read, but not exactly a page-turner. there is a latent tension in the story and the obvious secrets dealing with catherine's plasma laboratories, and the heavy scenes feel creepy and uncomfortable to breathe, almost smothering (it probably helped that it's summer as i'm writing this, and the heat is unbearable and gives me easy headaches, not unlike the way i feel when i'm hungover from wine like the characters constantly are).

the obvious issue, though, is that i think that by being too immersive, by capturing well the type of character ines is, we're left with a tension that dissolves after a couple of pages, and we're stuck in the head of a character that is unfeeling and not very proactive. it would be fine if this was a different novel, and i can deal perfectly with books that are vibes-only, but i do think the stakes it ultimately reaches are not matched by the level of the readers' investment by the time the plot really gets serious—which is about, what, 85% into the book? the investment the stakes demand is just too high to truly care at that point. the first part of this, detailing ines' first year, is by far the longest section, and ines spends most of it passively receiving information in ways that feel too convenient and not very engaging, only by matter of being there when her friends info-dump about catherine. by the time ines starts acting, getting into dangerous situations and making big discoveries, i'm not exactly at the edge of my seat. even the way she decides to deal with the biggest shock of the entire book just takes too long and makes the tension and weight of that situation deflate.

again, i liked the prose, and i liked the setting. the way ines described paintings is beautiful—it was nice to read that the author works at an art museum. i liked the core friend group and, even if a little too repetitive, it was fun to read what they got up to when they hung out; obviously yaya is a standout character and i love her. there were a lot of food descriptions, but oddly enough, i liked that, i felt it paired well with the semi-hedonist and drunken state they were often stuck on. the descriptions of baby's anguish over school were so intense that i felt it acutely with her, and her final breakdown broke my heart. there is a good foundation, an interesting story, and i can definitely see this working wonderfully for someone else. i guess the detachment from ines was so effective i ended up feeling detached from the story, too, and by the time i reached the final chapter, i found myself not feeling strongly about anything at all.