A review by momo916
Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas

mysterious tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.5

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.
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