L.E. Fidler's Reviews > Catalyst

you know what sucks? when you're about 150 pages into a novel and you get that funky deja-vu-y sort of vibe about it. or, more specifically, when you've had that deja-vu vibe for 150 pages or so and then you realize you've read it before.

yeah, that old chestnut.

you know what's worse? when you remember actively making the decision to stop reading a book, but then, upon accidentally rereading it, realize you've gone past the point of no return and now you have no choice but to see how this badboy plays out.

sigh.

just so you know, i'm most likely going to spoil this one.

right, so Catalyst begins like most other laurie halse anderson novels - with a girl, angsty, and prone to teenaged histrionics. our heroine is kate, the preacher's daughter, a science nerd bent on getting into MIT. so bent that she's decided to ONLY apply to MIT.

apparently, the mathematical side of science is not the compelling part for kate; those odds are terrible.

anyways, kate hasn't heard and she's stressed - like half-crazed, running at night, insomnia stressed. she is overcompensating for losing her mother at a young age by trying to become her mother (who did go to and graduate from MIT). she views life as a series of chemical reactions and equations and monitors her little brother's cough as if he's one of her on-going lab experiments. her father, a man of god, seems like a foreign entity to her, a girl who has actively chosen to define her life in terms of the rational and explainable. and, predictably, she hasn't clued him into her plan of only applying to one school.

because that's totally healthy.

around this point, i'm thinking: huh? this whole book can't be all about how this girl didn't get into MIT and goes more crazy, right? because that would be kind of lame.

enter teri.

teri is a beefy senior girl who is sort of depicted as a cross between a lumberjack, a biker babe, and cletus the slack-jawed yokel. we learn her pathetic backstory: teri got really fat in 9th grade, then she got thin (or thinner, muscular, like a female boxer). now she beats up football players and steals watches. or something.

ok, so teri is important.

long story short, teri's house burns down and teri and her two-year-old brother come to stay at the preacher's house, as teri's mom has a weak heart and her father went to prison and died (maybe in that order?). can you see where this is going?

good.

teri and kate have what can best be described as a fond mutual loathing for one another. kate uses teri's tragedy to deflect her father's questioning about her post-high school career when she does, in fact, get rejected from MIT. kate also starts to tolerate teri by attaching herself to the adorable little brother mikey and working on rebuilding teri's charred home. things are looking up (we even get a nifty little glimpse of that melinda girl from that other laurie halse anderson book - she's still hangin' with mr. freeman, working on her art therapy, getting down with her good self, if anyone's curious).

then, we get halse andersoned.

mikey goes missing! terror sets in! people start searching desperately. and i remember why i stopped reading.

(REALLY BIG SPOILER)



mikey dies. he gets electrocuted. i think i was pregnant at the time i was reading this and that's why i put it down way back when. i wish i had remembered that.

the rest of the story is just...awkward. mikey isn't teri's brother; he's her son. and her criminal dad was the father. absolutely no surprises there, of course. what is truly uncomfortable is how the motherless kate and the childless teri leach onto one another on their individual paths of self-destruction.

with about twenty pages left, i was wondering how the hell we were going to sordino ourselves out of this janitor's closet of a mess.

it isn't pretty. and it isn't particularly satisfactory. there is no real closure, just promises made in moments of severe vulnerability.

sad, but lacking the sincerity of Speak.