Catherine House: A Novel
by Elisabeth Thomas
Buy on AmazonCatherine House is a school of higher learning like no other. 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. In return, the school promises a future of sublime power and prestige. 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. But the House's strange protocols soon make this refuge feel increasingly like a gilded prison.
Recommended by
"What would it look like to fall in love with a place? And what would happen if that place turned out to be all wrong for you? In Catherine House, the protagonist, Ines, starts school at a gorgeous, mysterious, cloistered college in the Pennsylvania woods. But the more she becomes invested in her surroundings, the more readers get the sense that she needs, desperately, to get out. A beautiful, chilling read for those of us who might also be in need of a change in scenery."
NPR Books We Love — 2020 · apps.npr.org