Rent Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Synopsis

Blue Van Meer, a precocious and overeducated high-schooler, lives an unorthodox and migratory lifestyle, traveling from one quaint college town to the next with her father, a peripatetic professor. In her senior year, she is taken up by a quixotic band of teenage geniuses known as the Bluebloods and their eccentric ringleader, the film teacher Hannah Schneider. When Hannah ends up hanged from a tree (in a particularly anachronistic fashion), the erudite romp takes a delightfully sinister turn. Marisha Pessl's debut novel has a brilliant and immaculate architecture: each chapter is titled like a literature lecture, and the novel concludes with a final exam. The mystery plot is equally clever and masterfully orchestrated, and the characters are utterly compelling. This novel ushers in a scintillating new literary voice, a fiendish mix of Vladimir Nabokov, Alfred Hitchcock, and Donna Tartt.

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