I really wanted to love this book more than I did. My four stars is more like a three-and-a-half. I couldn't bring myself to give it just three.

What I loved: the writing and character development. I've seen a lot of reviewers say they didn't like Ines. Let me say that while I understand their reaction, I'm the opposite. I found her a great character to hang out with this past week. Something is driving her from the very first page, and I wanted to learn more about that. Ines is starved for direction in her life, and Catherine House fills that void in the most toxic ways.

The writing is wonderfully vivid and minimal. Even though the story drags a bit in the middle, Thomas pulled me along to the end. I found this book difficult to put down.

Things I'm unsure about: the amount of alcohol flowing through this isolated school's campus is bizarre. What's even stranger is how much the school itself makes the alcohol available to students. That's part of why it doesn't totally bother me, because part of Catherine House's game with its students is seducing them into staying. With that in mind, the idea that Catherine House would almost eagerly encourage its students' vices seems believable. I appreciated how during the last year on campus, one of the students makes the point that they aren't handling their hangovers as well as they used to, acknowledging there's a price to all this hard partying between such bizarrely difficult classes.

Things I didn't like: the big reason this book didn't hit five-star territory for me was the ending. The book spends a lot of time building up the conspiracy surround the chemical plasm, a chemical wonder that's exclusive to the school. Thomas doesn't spell out what the chemical exactly does to people. Instead, she does a nice job showing it in small bits and pieces. There's a lot of buildup surrounding plasm and how the school is using it on the students, and you feel as if it's building up to something huge and shocking, but I never felt that payoff. The ending almost reads as if Thomas was searching for a way to tie it up and wasn't really certain how to do it, that or she's trying to let the reader interpret the point of all this without handing the answers to the reader.

I've thought a lot about this book since I finished last night, and I suspect it will inhabit my thoughts for some time. Hoping I might make sense of the ending and get to update this review to reflect that. I really enjoyed Thomas' writing style, though, and I'd certainly be willing to pick up another of her books after my journey through Catherine House.