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American Horror Story meets the dark comedy of Kafka's The Metamorphosis as Cat searches for a way to escape her high school. A tale of family, love, tragedy, and masks--the ones others make for us, and the ones we make for ourselves. Katzenjammer will haunt fans of Chelsea Pitcher's This Lie Will Kill You and E. Lockhart's We Were Liars. Cat lives in her high school. She never leaves, and for a long time her school has provided her with everything she needs. But now things are changing. The hallways contract and expand along with the school's breathing, and the showers in the bathroom run a bloody red. Cat's best friend is slowly turning into cardboard, and instead of a face, Cat has a cat mask made of her own hardened flesh. Cat doesn't remember why she is trapped in her school or why half of them--Cat included--are slowly transforming. Escaping has always been the one impossibility in her school's upside-down world. But to save herself from the eventual self-destruction all the students face, Cat must find the way out. And to do that, she'll have to remember what put her there in the first place. Using chapters alternating between the past and the present, acclaimed author Francesca Zappia weaves a spine-tingling, suspenseful, and haunting story about tragedy and the power of memories. Fans of Marieke Nijkamp's This Is Where It Ends and Karen McManus's One of Us Is Lying will lose themselves in the pages of this novel--or maybe in the treacherous hallways of the school.
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Super mixed feelings about this. I did love how absolutely weird and off the wall the premise is. Cat is trapped in her high school along with dozens of other students, with no memory of when or how they got there, or why they're trapped. Some of the students, including Cat, have started to change in decidedly strange ways: Cat has a cat mask for a face (as seen in the book cover), another boy has a cardboard box for a head, another girl has tentacles, etc etc. It's a strange sort of body horror that creeps up on you as the story continues.
The current storyline is broken up by memories that are quickly returning to Cat of her time in real high school, where she has a best friend, loves art, and is bullied. Usually dual timelines leave me cold, but I enjoyed it here because the second past timeline is immediately reflected on by Cat in the next chapter of the current timeline: she is actively gaining these memories, and they have an emotional impact on her.
Once I got a foothold in the story, I started to understand where Zappia was going with this weird body horror metaphor. I won't say that I completely figured everything out, but the metaphor itself kind of became clear as time went by.
In the end, I don't think the metaphor quite worked out for me emotionally, and I'm not sure I enjoyed the ending.
However, despite my reading slump, once I picked this back up, I was super into it. Zappia's writing is very accessible and easy to breeze through, and she is especially great at the body horror and creeping weirdness of it all.
A solid 3 stars, overall.
Trigger warnings, hidden only because some may be considered spoilers for certain aspects of the story: bullying, cyber bullying, body horror, blood/gore/violence/murder, knife/gun violence.
0whoa, that was intense and absolutely heartbreaking. I loved the visuals that the author gave us of the different students that were trapped within the school. How the school changed the rooms and hallway, like it was a moving, living, breathing thing, changing the rooms and hallway. I loved the way this was written where our MC is remembering things little by little but doesn't understand how they fit into the issues she is dealing with now until the end. But when you find out WHY the kids are all trapped in the school.. your heartbreaks. As I said this was an intense book, and I will defiantly be thinking about it later.
CHECK TRIGGER WARNINGS
0This was an odd magical realism that is super dark. The ending is going to haunt me for a while. I've read quite a few upsetting books, and this one is just as gut-wrenching while still being a unique story unfolding in past and present chapters.
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