Calamity Physics

Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics

I read this on the recommendation of one of my former Western Civ students--she said that it seemed like the kind of book a Western Civ aficionado would like. It isn't hard to see why she said this--the chapter titles alone are great: the First chapter is "Othello, William Shakespeare;" the last chapter is "Metamorphoses, Ovid." And every chapter in between is titled with the name of a famous book (or at least presumably famous--one book I have never heard of and one book is a fictional book written by one of the characters in the novel).

The story is a standard bildungsroman of a high school girl. The girl, named Blue, is, to put it mildly, bookish. The book is written in first person. I believe this book may have the highest number of book references per page of any novel ever written (and at least some of those references are to real books--I have no idea how many of the scholarly tomes referenced are real). And thus, for someone who is probably over-obsessed with books (Hi, my name is [fill in the blank] and I am a bookoholic") the book does have an immediate charm.

The story itself was fine--it took me until about page 300 to start caring what would happen in the story, but the last 200 pages were interesting. The book ends with what is meant to be a series of shocking plot developments, but after the first big surprise, the rest were not all that surprising. (And, this isn't a mystery novel in which one looks for clues to solve the big surprise before it comes--there is no way to decipher it before the fact.) Even still the last 200 pages are clever.

On the whole, I liked it and I am glad I read it. That being said, I doubt I would rush out to buy Pessl's next novel (assuming there will be a next novel).

And the book has absolutely nothing to do with Physics.