[Bananafish] Insignificant Note

[Puebloshalom at cs.com]

Has anyone stumbled over Special Topics in Calamity Physics  by Marisha 
Pessl?

Daniel
 
  Here's a review:
>From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Pessl's stunning debut is an elaborate construction modeled 
after the syllabus of a college literature course—36 chapters are named after 
everything from Othello to Paradise Lost to The Big Sleep—that culminates with 
a final exam. It comes as no surprise, then, that teen narrator Blue Van Meer, 
the daughter of an itinerant academic, has an impressive vocabulary and a 
knack for esoteric citation that makes Salinger's Seymour Glass look like a 
dunce. Following the mysterious death of her butterfly-obsessed mother, Blue and 
her father, Gareth, embark, in another nod to Nabokov, on a tour of picturesque 
college towns, never staying anyplace longer than a semester. This doesn't 
bode well for Blue's social life, but when the Van Meers settle in Stockton, 
N.C., for the entirety of Blue's senior year, she befriends—sort of—a group of 
eccentric geniuses (referred to by their classmates as the Bluebloods) and their 
ringleader, film studies teacher Hannah Schneider. As Blue becomes enmeshed 
with Hannah and the Bluebloods, the novel becomes a murder mystery so 
intricately plotted that, after absorbing the late-chapter revelations, readers will be 
tempted to start again at the beginning in order to watch the tiny clues fall 
into place. Like its intriguing main characters, this novel is many things at 
once—it's a campy, knowing take on the themes that made The Secret History 
and Prep such massive bestsellers, a wry sendup of most of the Western canon 
and, most importantly, a sincere and uniquely twisted look at love, coming of age 
and identity. (Aug.) 




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