Blue van Meer and her somewhat eccentric dad live a nomadic life as he jumps between visiting professorships all over the country. Our story takes place during Blue's senior year of high school in North Carolina, when the two actually stay in one place for an entire year. She meets a collection of unusual characters, most notably Hannah Schneider, a film studies teacher at the high school with a somewhat mysterious past. The most memorable and enchanting part of this book is the writing style. Blue's lively narration is rife with intellectual asides, all backed up with MLA-style citations. I kept wondering how many of the references were real. So convinced was I of the legitimacy of the sources that I was rather surprised to discover that the Night Watchmen don't actually exist. I found the plot and the unique storytelling methods delightful. And for the record, I think Blue is 100% correct. (Those who have read the book will know what I mean.)

I listened to this on audiobook. Though the reader (Emily Janice Card) was fantastic, the "visual aids" (illustrations) and other textual ornamentation would have been a nice addition. I picked up a hardcover copy at the library, so I was able to see what I was missing. Card was one of the best female readers I've ever heard; the story would have simply been better to experience as intended. ( )

Not quite the successor to Donna Tartt's The Secret History as promised in the promotional material but certainly a great read with a few surprises. ( )

This is a truly bizarre novel, one that held my attention throughout, but I still wasn’t sure if I liked it, even at the end. The protagonist, Blue Van Meer, narrates her last year in high school and its strange events as if she is writing a thesis, complete with bibliographic references. In fact, the endless parenthetical references get a little tiresome and cutesy. The novel feels overwritten, stuffed as it is with metaphors and similes, some of them quite improbable. And the final twists, even when they come, are both completely unexpected and somewhat unbelievable. Still I bought it, partly thanks to the last section, written like a final exam, which serves as an epilogue and sheds some light-or questions-on key plot points. ( )

Smart and unexpected, Marisha Pessl’s Special topics in Calamity Physics is unlike any novel I’ve ever read. The narrator is high school student, Blue van Meer, a girl raised by her father, a professor, who constantly moves them around the country, with literature and political science replacing the typical background noise of a car radio. Blue is an intellectual in her own right, an astute observer of the mechanics of the world around her, with understandings uncommon for someone her age.

“A. Boone [the desk clerk at the police station] continued to chew the coffee stirrer and stared at me. He was what Dad commonly called a ‘power distender,’ a person who seized the moment in which he/she possessed a marginal amount of power and brutally rationed it so it lasted an unreasonable amount of time.”

Blue becomes involved with a bizarre group of friends, led by an enigmatic and unstable teacher at her newest school. The story involves teen relationships, mystery, social mores, murder and more. This gripping coming of age novel is at times funny and ironic, many times poignant. Each chapter title is named for a piece of literature, and throughout the book there are annotations by Blue, comparing her experiences to various pieces of writing, music and art.

“The girl…nervously bared her long and pointy teeth (see ‘Venus Flytrap,’ North American Flora, Starnes, 1989).”

Relating all of her experiences like a third person observing from a distance, Blue’s unique voice comes out loud and clear. Is the book pretensious? A little. But in Blue van Meer and her father, Pessl has created characters not easily forgotten. ( )

A lot of people on my assorted friends' lists have been remarkably impressed by this. I would have been more inclined to be so if (a) the author had been less convinced herself of what a clever ickle girl she was, (b) most of her allusions and references had not been invented and the remainder were not quite so banal, and (c) if the Surprise Ending had not been quite so blindingly obvious from the word go. ( )