book club
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book club What did we get up to over the holidays you ask? We had our nose deep into the 500 pages of Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics, a brilliant new book that’s part trip through the literary canon, part murder mystery, and all page-turning cleverness. That she’s been called a female Nabokov by the New York Times (who named this, her first book, one of the 10 best of 2006) is your first clue. Pessl’s own whimsical illustrations punctuate a story that follows our heroine Blue Van Meer as she struggles with being a nerdy, bright kid at a U.S. private school raised by a charismatic and controlling professor father whom she idolizes. Though the lit-laden prose can feel sophomoric at times (as befits a 28-year-old author who graduated from Brown with honours) the refreshing and original new voice it offers far outweighs the fact. And though Pessl is so attractive the publishers worried about including an author picture on the dust jacket, her talent has met with universal approval. Because—as you well know—beauty and brains are never mutually exclusive. Check out the equally inventive website at www.calamityphysics.com Order Special Topics in Calamity Physics (from $22) online at Chapters. |