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.

Can somebody explain to me why, oh why the editor did not chop off 150 pages off this book? So far none of what I’ve read is necessary. I’ve been hauling this book for months and I can’t read more than a page at a time. However I’m giving it a chance, I’m sure it must own up to the hype it made, but so it has been snobbish unnecesary babble.

A buoyant and hyper-literary debut, Marisha Pessl’s ‘Special Topics in Calamity Physics’ is a murder mystery narrated by a precocious teenage girl, the only child of a brilliant, nomadic professor and a dead mother. Each of the books chapters takes its title from a classic work of literature. I was ready to dislike this book because it verges on gimmicky, but I was bowled over by the relentlessness of the story’s pace and the freshness of Pessl’s literary voice.