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Laddar... Catherine Houseav Elisabeth Thomas
![]() Det finns inga diskussioner på LibraryThing om den här boken. This was awesome! Creepy, gothic college steeped in mystery. An antihero young woman protagonist with a dark past. I highly recommend this to anyone that likes suspenseful coming of age stories with a satisfying reveal. I am impressed this is a debut novel for Elisabeth Thomas and look forward to reading more from her. ***Contains Spoilers*** DNF at 54%. This book is easy to read, I think that's why I made it so far without a plot point in sight. I can see how other people who may be into slightly apathetic slice-of-life stories could like this. I need something, ANYTHING, to happen to keep my interest. And, I mean, things DO happen. Things that should effect the main character profoundly, and she just continues with her routine like her best friend didn't just die suddenly. Also, if the plasm can legit mend things why don't they use it to fix the house that is literally falling apart? Great atmospheric scene-setting. I love this idea of writing the book you wish you could have read, and I get that as there's a nostalgia here for the YA I read when I was a YA, along with a kind of joyful surrealism. Plot-wise I found this a bit vague and inconclusive, not in a challenging intentional way, but, I don't know how to say this. As if the author is very clear about the scene they are invoking, but I'm not. It feels very much like books I loved for that reason at the time, so I guess I'm just saying I'm no longer in the right brainspace to have that be a fully satisfying story. I still enjoyed this as a listen during a few rainy days.
With its cultlike fixation on control and secrecy, it’s clear from the outset that something is deeply wrong with Catherine House. The narrative feels haunted by a sense of decay and fear.... There are shades of Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock as suspense builds in the winding corridors of the house and the twisting turns of the psyche. Moody and evocative as a fever dream, “Catherine House” is the sort of book that wraps itself around your brain, drawing you closer with each hypnotic step. It is a coming-of-age story, a thriller, science-fiction and a Gothic novel all at once.... Catherine House employs that wonderful Gothic convention of an inexplicable sense of wrongness.... With a compelling narrator and truly inventive setting, Catherine House embraces Gothic conventions even as it defies expectation and utilizes them in new and exciting ways. It challenges the genre while embracing it and takes readers on a truly unique journey. Gothic horror provides the architecture for an arrestingly strange melange of speculative fiction and teen trauma in this atmospheric debut novel.... Ines’s apathy can drag but nibbling menace spurs the plot onwards. For fans of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), Catherine House is a haunting, atmospheric reflection on the discovery of self and others. At times terrifying, always gorgeously captivating, Thomas’ debut is one not to be missed, and perhaps to be revisited frequently. Surreal imagery, spare characterization, and artful, hypnotic prose lend Thomas’s tale a delirious air, but at the book’s core lies a profound portrait of depression and adolescent turmoil. Fans of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History will devour this philosophical fever dream. A Priser
Fiction.
Literature.
Romance.
Thriller.
HTML: "[A] delicious literary Gothic debut." ??THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, EDITORS' CHOICE "Moody and evocative as a fever dream, Catherine House is the sort of book that wraps itself around your brain, drawing you closer with each hypnotic step." ?? THE WASHINGTON POST A Most Anticipated Novel by Entertainment Weekly ? New York magazine ? Cosmopolitan ? The Atlantic ? Forbes ? Good Housekeeping ? Parade ? Better Homes and Gardens ? HuffPost ? Buzzfeed ? Newsweek ? Harper's Bazaar ? Ms. Magazine ? Woman's Day ? PopSugar ? and more! A gothic-infused debut of literary suspense, set within a secluded, elite university and following a dangerously curious, rebellious undergraduate who uncovers a shocking secret about an exclusive circle of students . . . and the dark truth beneath her school's promise of prestige. Trust us, you belong here. Catherine House is a school of higher learning like no other. Hidden deep in the woods of rural Pennsylvania, this crucible of reformist liberal arts study with its experimental curriculum, wildly selective admissions policy, and formidable endowment, has produced some of the world's best minds: prize-winning authors, artists, inventors, Supreme Court justices, presidents. For those lucky few selected, tuition, room, and board are free. But acceptance comes with a price. Students are required to give the House three years??summers included??completely removed from the outside world. Family, friends, television, music, even their clothing must be left behind. In return, the school promises a future of sublime power and prestige, and that its graduates can become anything or anyone they desire. Among this year's incoming class is Ines Murillo, who expects to trade blurry nights of parties, cruel friends, and dangerous men for rigorous intellectual discipline??only to discover an environment of sanctioned revelry. Even the school's enigmatic director, Viktória, encourages the students to explore, to expand their minds, to find themselves within the formidable iron gates of Catherine. For Ines, it is the closest thing to a home she's ever had. But the House's strange protocols soon make this refuge, with its worn velvet and weathered leather, feel increasingly like a gilded prison. And when tragedy strikes, Ines begins to suspect that the school??in all its shabby splendor, hallowed history, advanced theories, and controlled decadence??might be hiding a dangerous agenda within the secretive, tightly knit group of students selected to study its most promising and mysterious curriculum. Combining the haunting sophistication and dusky, atmospheric style of Sarah Waters with the unsettling isolation of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Catherine House is a devious, deliciously steamy, and suspenseful page-turner with shocking twists Inga biblioteksbeskrivningar kunde hittas. |
Deltog i LibraryThing FörhandsrecensenterElisabeth Thomass bok Catherine House delades ut via LibraryThing Early Reviewers. Pågående diskussionerIngen/ingaPopulära omslag
![]() GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyKlassifikation enligt LCBetygMedelbetyg:![]()
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Ok, I'll start off with what I don't like, which unfortunately can be summed up as "the writing". I don't mean that Thomas is a bad writer necessarily, but this felt like an early draft—there's a lot of unrealized potential. The characters are flat, hard to differentiate from one another, and frankly almost none of them need to exist, including our narrator who, after 320 pages, I still know almost nothing about. The idea here was an interesting one—very high achieving students who nonetheless have no other options, for one reason or another—is potentially very compelling, but I never really felt that either of those things were true for anyone other than Baby, who dies about a third of the way in. The setting was likewise disappointing; the cult-like tendencies and claustrophobia were mentioned frequently, but there wasn't any follow through. It absolutely baffles me that so many people call this "atmospheric" (unless what they really mean is "mostly empty"?). Consequently I found the whole thing rather hard to get through, even though the language itself is straightforward enough and it's not particularly long.
With that being said, there's also a lot here that's surprisingly well done, especially considering the aforementioned weakness with the writing in general. Normally I dislike when a book fails to mention its central plot (let alone its whole genre), but here I think it worked really well. The revelation of information about the "new materials" is impressive and works well with the otherwise unimportant period setting, and the potential of this idea (with respect to both the world of the story and the plot) is fully realized. The whole thing is genuinely really impressive and even more so because it was so unexpected. (