People have been telling me I had to read this book ever since it came out. I picked it up once and found the writing to be a little overmuch, too cluttered with metaphors and asides, and I gave up in about 50 pages. The second time I felt the same way, but found that the further I read, the more it was like the narrator was immersing me in her language and I was becoming fluent. And once you reach that level of fluency...! Brilliant, breathtaking, charming, sad, funny, and left me forgetting to breathe again and again. What's funny is, this book is a page-turner. The plot is enthralling, you always want to know what's going to happen next, and the writer seems to almost intentionally want to frustrate the reader in that drive for plot. The narrator is so full of asides and rambling memories--right in the middle of things happening that you sometimes want to shake her--but--but what happens next?! But that is the charm of this precocious narrator with a head full of more books than she knows what to do with and a melancholy past and a claustrophobic present that threaten to engulf her. The end, well, the end left me devastated in a very personal way, as if it happened to me, and in that way, it's hard to call this one of my favorite books, only because it broke my heart. But I'm working on forgiving it. ( )

As a bookseller, I'm very conscious of the fact that different people like different books. My job is to find the right book for the right person, not to try to foist my personal preferences on everyone that walks through the door. And that goes for every book, except Special Topics in Calamity Physics. There's no one that shouldn't read this delightful novel that packs more metaphors per sentence than any other book I've ever read. It took me almost four years to convince my wife to read it all the way through and love it as much as I do, but eventually I did. Over those four years, I've convinced many friends and customers to do the same. I have the rest of my life, to reach the rest of the world with this particular literary evangelist project. That means YOU whoever it is that's reading this. ( )

Really an original book. Never read anything like it. ( )

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. ( )

I think STICP has been and will be appreciated and enjoyed by many readers. I, however, found that the book dragged. I found the references and foot-notes, both real and imagined, only served the purpose intended by the author infrequently, if her purpose was to entertain and educate. I felt that the flow of the story was interrupted by the many side-bars taken by Blue, the narrator and main character. Blue and her father, Gareth, (one of Pessl's more interesting characters) settle down, after years of traveling due to Gareth's colorful and inconsistent methods of teaching. Blue is befriended by her teacher, Hannah Schneider and a group of students who consider themselves special. They call themselves the "Bluebloods." Pessl takes far too long to give the reader a glimmer of the events to come. Rather than sounding erudite, the book's character's sound stuffy and full of themselves. I tired of the dialogue which never seemed to go anywhere. I was surprised to read reviews that said that Pessl was not as smart as the book leads one to believe. The idea of the book , while not completely original, suffers more from execution than lack of originality. The characters are undeveloped, despite the scads of details about their lives. It's like looking at a photo album where one sees all the details but is left with nothing more than an image. I think some careful editing, and by careful I mean, cautious, so as not to deviate too much from the author's unique approach, might have made the story flow more smoothly. Not so much chatty detail may have made the novel less of a coming-of-age book by changing the tone, but would have made for a less chaotic read. I can see the merits of the novel and I believe it could be enjoyed by some readers,it just wasn't for me. ( )

There are quite a few critical reviews of this book, but I contend those that had such terrible problems with STICP were not viewing it through the right lens. I would describe this as a post-YA book. It follows all of the conventions - it takes place during a school year, it is preoccupied with social and acceptance issues, and most of the characters are simple high school stereotypes, not developed real people.

If this book, then, is the next, more advanced step for the kids weaned on Speak and Gossip Girl, this book seems a lot more appropriate, at least in terms of the flat characters, the ultra-hip language and overly ambitious metaphors, the know-it-all aspect of the main character and her quirky citation gimmick, and the reliance on cliques and their issues to carry the story.

The post YA-approach makes a lot of this book more palatable than it would be otherwise, but it does not address all of the issues I have with this work. It is too long and fails to justify its length. The first three hundred pages ring of Cruel Intentions, but that seductive naughtiness is abandoned for a mystery-revelation ending that seems incongruously innocent and tacked on.

Overall, the book was an enjoyable read that kept me up far past bedtime on several occasions. It featured several creative flourishes that were entertaining (even the quiz at the end, cheesy as it was, was a unique way to add a little denouement.) This is the type of book I'd recommend to the right person. ( )

This is a high school novel, with characters that barely develop.

It's important, in assessing novels, not to be impressed by knowledge and allusions. The allusions and citations in this book are sometimes clever but mainly pedestrian. Erudition, even real erudition, never makes a novel, even for Elias Canetti, and certainly not for Umberto Eco.

Pessl is not a particularly knowledgeable person; she's more a product of her undergraduate university education, swimming in a soup of half-digested half-popular academic knowledge, in the same boat as the author and screenwriter of 'Watchmen.' Without the supposedly clever allusions and tricks, there is only the psychology. At that level, this book doesn't take a single step past high school: the most important thing for its characters, and even for its author, is whether or not they might be accepted into their preferred social groups. ( )

There are better coming of age books. There are better mystery books. There are better philosophical type books. This book tried to be all three and more.Blue Van Meer joins a school in North Carolina for her senior year, and becomes involved with a group of friends (known as the Bluebloods) and a teacher, Hannah Schneider. When they go on an illfated camping trip, everything changes, and her whole life turns upside down.The book is written from Blue's point of view, and is smattered with references and asides to real and made-up books, which does get a bit tedious. The story itself is quite exciting and interesting, particularly towards the end, although many of the characters are quite flat and two-dimensional. There are better books. ( )

I loved this book so much that I had to read it twice! I went to UNC-Asheville and enjoyed the book. Also, as an English teacher, I appreciated the literay allusions. ( )

Prepare yourself for a rocky but rewarding reading experience. The book is essentially a compilation of the fictional Blue van Meer's notes and evidence, complete with textual citations, as she solves the mystery of the enigmatic Hanna Schneider whose suicide throws Blue's life into chaos. Blue has spent the last ten years traveling the country with her father, settling into small towns for six months at a time as he takes on visiting professorships at various universities. Sixteen-year-old Blue, a highly intelligent young lady with a very active imagination and little sense of identity, has never really formed friendships, until she and her father settle in for Blue's senior year of high school. Blue soon finds herself taken under the wing of Hannah Schneider, the film teacher at her school, and through Hannah she is introduced into the elite school clique known as the Bluebloods.

For a debut work, this is a remarkably well-constructed novel. The plot is tight and cohesive, and all the seemingly extraneous details and characters eventually come to play a significant role. Everything means something, at least to Blue, who pieces together the puzzle of a suicide/murder. Though there is no full resolution to the plot by the end of the novel, Blue has satisfied her own curiosity, and the kaleidoscopic narrative ultimately reveals a relatively straightforward image. Pessl makes a bold move in leaving the conclusion so open-ended, but after all, who among us ever gets all her questions answered? It is left to the reader to determine the answers, which allows the story to wriggle under the reader's skin and reside there as an insatiable itch for a long time to come. This is not a novel that is easily forgotten.

The main flaw in Pessl's writing is the tendency toward Too Much: The State of Being Overdone. With so much written out as a Scientific Term (see "sesquipedalian," Merriam Webster Online, 2009), the prose takes on a certain tedium that makes this already long book just drag. (Of course, a lot of the textual citations are Pessl's inventions, reminiscent of the invented footnotes in Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman.) While Pessl's choice to craft the narrative this way certainly has merit, and is fitting to the character she has created, it does little to enliven the reading experience. The tedium is lessened in the audio format, but the meta-textuality is nevertheless an impediment to a smooth reading. The visual aids are a nice touch; also, much like Hirschfeld's Ninas, Hannah's face hides in many of them.

Despite the challenging nature of the prose, I truly enjoyed the literary artistry of the text, and even more so for the fact that this is a debut novel from a previously unknown author. Let the New York Times criticize her for being just another pretty face; I'm impressed with her monumental effort, and the brilliance of this fun and challenging work.

This review might contain a minor spoiler or two.

It takes quite a while before this book reveals it's hand and let's the reader in on what kind of story it actually is. For a long time I find myself pending between reading a pretty straight coming of age story and a crime story a la "The secret history" waiting to happen. It's only in towards the second half of the book you realise which the main subjects the book deals with are. This is both a blessing (there are a lot of unexpected twists and turns and aha moments) and a curse (since Pessl seems to have a hard time knowing what to do with those "Aristocrats" when they're not involved in the main plot anymore). All in all it is a little far fetched this book, but thrilling and cosy to read. A good pageturner for your summer hammock, no doubt. ( )

Not a book to skim if you want to enjoy all the asides along with all the literary and popular references. I love how Blue, the main character and narrator of the story, changes nouns into verbs as well as how she so aptly explains her feelings about someone and creates visuals by saying, "See..." referencing a book or an illustration. This novel is hard to categorize. Coming-of-age for sure, but also part mystery or even thriller--well, not quite that. The story isn't necessarily funny; Blue is still trying to deal with the death of a favorite teacher more than a year ago, and most people would not want to live her last year in high school--at least how she describes it--but Blue is always funny in a very intelligent, sardonic way that captivated me even as it was getting her in trouble.

An unusual book. Blue lives with her professor father, who decides that for her senior year, they'll stay in one place for the entire year rather than move around as normal. She's befriended by a teacher at the school who throws her in with a group of kids that hang out with her on the weekends. I can't even begin to describe the twists and turns that this book takes. I did really enjoy it. ( )

“As a Harvard freshman recounting the events of the previous year, when her childhood "unstitched like a snagged sweater," Blue remembers being thoroughly in thrall to her father, a political science professor who changes jobs at third-tier colleges so frequently that by age 16 she's attended 24 different schools. To compensate for this rootlessness (her lepidopterist mom died in a car crash when Blue was 5), Dad has promised his daughter an undisturbed senior year in the North Carolina mountain town of Stockton, where Blue will attend the ultra-preppy St. Gallway School.
It's at St. Gallway that Blue's dedication to her pompous, theory-spouting father begins to waver. Her attention is diverted by the school's most glamorous figures, a clique of five flighty kids called the Bluebloods who meet every Sunday night for dinner at the home of their mentor, Hannah Schneider, a charismatic film teacher.”(Washington Post, 2007).

It is not often that a book gets to me the way this one did. A few days into the reading I had a dream about the characters; this is how much I identified with Pessl’s book (yes this how her last name is spelled). The main character Blue Van Meer (I love this name!) and her father Garth remind me of my best friend in high school and her father (though they did not travel, rather her dad attracted many people to his world). Garth Van Meer is a laid back political professor who thinks rather highly of himself but has little regard for other people’s feelings, especially the women who come and go. Blue calls these women June Bugs as they are attracted to her father like a bug to a flame, and like bugs and flame, nothing good comes to these women. My friend Heidi’s dad would date women for sex, but when they wanted more he pushed them away without a thought about the feelings of these women. Garth Van Meer does the same.

The book takes place during Blue’s senior year at a preppy high school, and like many teens finds herself drawn to a group of her peers while pulling away from her dad. Reading the novel as Blue starts to see her dad in a new light just as she starts to rebel, got me thinking about the relationship between parent and child. It seems to me no matter how well we think we have raised our kids, they can be highly influenced by their peers. Years of careful parenting can be thrown out the window if our children fall under the spell of other kids. At some point in our relationship our children will stop seeing us as mom or dad and start seeing us as humans. This change can sometimes be painful, for Blue it is shattering.

The charismatic teacher Hannah Schneider seems at first to be the tragic figure in the novel, the reader is told in the beginning that she is found hanging from a tree. The story is about the events that led up to this suicide (or was it?). Again, it seems Hannah is the tragic figure, but as the book unfolds it becomes clear all the characters are tragic or damaged in some way.

Pessl manages to make five spoiled preppy teens sympathetic, though not always likable, not an easy task and not one that many first time writers can pull off. I never really cared about them, but I did understand them so what ends up happening makes their response believable. What is not believable is the final plot scenario. It is not that Pessl writes a twist; rather she brings the reader in a secret that is not only unbelievable, but leaves the reader asking questions. There are a couple of serious plot holes that make the ending feel forced and drags the book down. The other thing that drags the book down is Pessl incessant use of footnotes in the text (see redundant in any dictionary). At first the footnotes drive Pessl’s description but after awhile they start to wear on the reader and become a distraction.

This is Pessl’s first novel and though I had problems with the plot and her writing style I do hope she writes more books, minus the footnotes in quotations. I would not hesitate to read another by her. After all, it is not often I dream about fictional characters. ( )

How does one plan a book like this? To set a murder mystery (we have no idea it's a murder mystery except for some prescient comments along the way, until well into the story) in a clever high schooler's senior year, and make her not only solve the mystery, but suffer abandonment as a result! This exceedingly clever piece contains multiple cultural references on every page, most of them actually valid. We have a startlingly erudite high school senior, who falls in with a clique of charismatic and clever classmates and who is able to complete her senior year without benefit of parents.

The language in this fresh, engaging piece is what propels it along. We keep turning pages because we begin to care what happens to Blue, and Hannah, the enigmatic teacher who proctors the creative group along the way. But for all the throw-away culture and kids-playing-at-adulthood, we have a deathly story underneath, in which Hannah loses her life and Blue's Dad disappears the minute Blue figures it (almost all the way) out.

Ms. Pessl amazes with her multitudinous references, her deadpan delivery, and the reality of the angst her characters feel. This is a debut you should definitely pick up, and a career we should definitely follow. ( )

I liked this book. It was a good summer read. Cleverly written, although a wee bit pretentious. I highly recommend it. ( )

Has to be a mixed review from me--an odd book. I was delighted at first--not usually much interested in high school stuff, cliques and all, but loved 16-year-old Blue Van Meer with her skanky wit and over-the-top erudition and loved the mysterious femme fatale Hannah Schneider--had a great time for about 200 pages. Then I started to get heartily sick of the relentlessly over-written aspect--not every noun needs an elaborate metaphor, after all, started to feel like I wanted to skip over them to try to find the story (not like me at all to get sick of writing for writing’s sake!). Instead of being impressed as I was at first, I began to feel that for every one dazzling image there were nine clams (did the writing actually become strained, did she run out, lose track of appropriateness--or did I just get sick of it? Don’t know). Then there’s the fact that it seems to become a completely different book at about page 300 or so--quite a preamble for a murder. That said, I absolutely couldn’t put it down once Hannah turned up dead (which was not a secret--mentioned a couple of times on the dust jacket, yet I still managed to forget it was coming). That said, the inconclusiveness of it all was somewhat irritating. (It ends--very irritatingly--with a too-cute-by-half final exam that leaves nearly all conclusions to the reader.) But so much of it is so well done…blah, blah, blah. A good recommendation for fans of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Saffran Foer. (Can’t see recommending it for mystery fans--classifying it as one seems like a mistake.) And the other experimental smart guys like Eggers and Danielewski. Maybe a stepchild of Donna Tartt’s Secret History. ( )

I had high expectations for this book, but it moved too slowly, so I lost interest. Didn't finish it. I did like the constant book references throughout, though -- a neat touch. ( )

I really enjoyed this book. I can certainly see why people would not, though. The conceits, the precociousness (precocity?) of Blue, the many, many literary and other references....sure, I can see why some would get tired of it. I really didn't, though. I enjoyed it the whole way through. I would probably have to disagree with the critics who raved over Pessl's prose, because some of it was confusing, some of it was ridiculously heavy-handed, and some of it was just silly. I had the feeling that the editor got tired towards the end, because I noticed several sentences with a missing "is" or something similar, and because the similes seemed to multiply in the last 30 pages. But, if you look past some of the silliness and frippery, it was a novel I couldn't put down. And maybe I fell prey to Pessl's flattery that I could catch most of her literary allusions. What a fun read! ( )

Ugh. This book just kind of irritated me. I mean, I guess she's a good writer. But it was too long and weirdly became a mystery 3/4 of the way through and I kind of didn't really care what happened to anyone. Plus, she kept describing people's clothes and hair which drives me NUTS. ( )