A review by avokaitotoast
Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas

challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

This is a solid „good“ book. You won’t be clutching your seat in suspense, but it definitely was interesting and managed to do dark-academia without feeling like every other book I‘ve read.

One thing that was frustrating in this book is that the main character struggles with very severe depression. She’s very apathetic and that effects the narrative a lot (since it’s in first person). She doesn’t really care about what’s going on half the time and is a very unreliable narrator because of that.

Something that I think could be a love it or hate it thing is the pacing of this book — sometimes months will go by in one page and sometimes it takes a whole chapter to get through a day. It’s very disjointed, but for me it felt like a reflection of the main characters mental health and participation in the events: sometimes time moves incredibly slowly and sometimes she blinks and days have passed. It’s fitting, and kind of cool.

About the ending: I’ve seen a lot of reviews saying that it was unsatisfying and it didn’t answer a lot of the questions the readers had been asking. While I agree with that, I kind of liked it? The unsatisfying ending felt very fitting. I liked that there was neither a bad ending or a happy ending, just an ending. 

I feel like people forget that with the main characters mind set there was no way we were going to get a nice cohesive ending u less there was a ~oh my god my depression is miraculously cured and my whole personality has changed~ moment, which would suck and ruin the whole book to be honest.

The only thing that I genuinely did not like about the book was that there was a little bit of a „chosen one“ trope with the main character. It’s implied heavily by the school director that the main character is special, that they picked *her* to join the school. HOWEVER — with the way the school is run, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is what they tell all of the students. We only get one students perspective after all.
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