Blue is a very well-read young woman, so along with gauche drawings and hundreds of parenthetic bibliographical references, she names each chapter of her story after works from the canon. It is, however, the structure and style of Pessl's novel that have attracted attention. The first two-thirds of the book describes the long, fraught initiation of Blue into this glamorous and insular group, while the last third concerns Blue's mounting suspicion that her enigmatic and beautiful teacher was somehow murdered. There she encounters the Bluebloods, an elite group of students who are the proteges of a charismatic film studies teacher, the compellingly mysterious Hannah Schneider, whom, we learn in the opening pages, Blue will find hanged during a camping trip. Blue spends her final high-school year at a private college in North Carolina. The novel is the first-person narrative of Blue Van Meer, a bright teenager who since her mother's death has travelled the country with her arrogant, pompous but devoted father Gareth, a peripatetic lecturer in political science who is, in his daughter's eyes, "one of the pre-eminent commentators on American culture". Published in the US to reviews of saucer-eyed admiration and already in its fifth printing there, Special Topics in Calamity Physics carries a heavy burden of expectation, which it only partly fulfils. This young American author's first novel, the subject of a bidding war, was eventually sold to Penguin for a six-figure sum.
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