Special Topics on Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl

Brazilian Cover

I have to say its much better than the original one

You can call me crazy, but I saw that book in a Bookstore next to my house and I was really curious about it.
After reading its review, I decided I wanted to read. However, the book was really expensive here in Brazil (R$65,00 = which would be $32,00), so I decided to wait. Soon enough, the Bookstore went out of business and sold every book really cheap. A bad news are always followed by a good ones. Or the other way around. I preferred the bookstore. Oh Well!

The book became a metro book for me, that's how I call the books I read during the 45 minutes on the daily metro (1,3 hours total). Usually I read fast books, poems or short stories are preferred. They are faster and easier to read with all those people, music and noise around.

Anyway, I am slowly reading Special Topics on Calamity Physics on my way to work and I am finding it really nice. The narrative is amazing. The tone is ironic and slightly funny. The story is a mystery.
                             

"Dazzling," (People) "Exuberant," (Vogue) "marvelously entertaining," (The Dallas Morning News) Marisha Pessl's mesmerizing debut has critics raving and heralds the arrival of a vibrant new voice in American fiction. At the center of this "cracking good read"4 is clever, deadpan Blue van Meer, who has a head full of literary, philosophical, scientific, and cinematic knowledge. But she could use some friends. Upon entering the elite St. Gallway school, she finds some-a clique of eccentrics known as the Bluebloods. One drowning and one hanging later, Blue finds herself puzzling out a byzantine murder mystery. Nabokov meets Donna Tartt (then invites the rest of the Western Canon to the party) in this novel-with "visual aids" drawn by the author-that has won over readers of all ages.




Publishers Weekly:
Starred Review. Pessl's showy (often too showy) debut novel, littered as it is with literary references and obscure citations, would seem to make an unlikely candidate for a successful audiobook. Yet actor and singer Emily Janice Card (a North Carolina native like the author) has a ball with Pessl's knotty, digressive prose, eating up Pessl's array of voices, impressions and asides like an ice-cream sundae. Card reads as if she is composing the book as she goes along, with a palpable sense of enjoyment present in almost every line reading. Her girlish voice, immature but knowing, is the perfect sound for Pessl's protagonist and narrator Blue van Meer, wise beyond her years even as she stumbles through a disastrous final year of high school. Card brings out the best in Pessl's novel and papers over its weak spots as ably as she can.