A review by brittbat
Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas

3.0

I found it difficult to engage fully with this book because the narrator herself is so disengaged from the scene she inhabits, or at least, she speaks to the reader as though she is. I spent 300 pages with characters who never felt like more than vague acquaintances, wondering about an experimental science that was never really explained. This book is an incredibly slow burn that builds to an unsettling conclusion, but turning the final page feels somewhat anticlimactic... But I would absolutely watch a film adaptation, if it granted the story some objectivity that the book lacks as a result of being filtered through the narrator’s skewed perspective. I want little glimpses of how people perceive her, and how the house really is, earlier in the narrative to contrast with her ideas of reality.

Maybe I’ll appreciate this more the longer I think about it.