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Must try less hard. If you’re looking for a book that leaves you torn between racing on to the next page and hurling the thing across the room then fret no more: your weird quest is over. Pessl’s debut, for which her US publisher forked out six figures, mixes murder mystery with coming-of-age high school drama in an occasionally beguiling but mostly infuriating way. Harvard freshman Blue recounts in essay form the events during her senior year in high school leading up to and immediately following her discovering Hannah, an idiosyncratic teacher, dead in the forest. But before we get to the murder Pessl drags us through 300 pages of conversations with her political scientist father, a cultural snob par excellence, and Blue’s pathological urge to prove she’s the smartest teenager on the planet. You could argue in hindsight that Blue’s infuriating, page-swelling narrative style (why use one analogy when three will do?) is deliberate, but given that this palpably isn’t the Great American Novel (or novels – there are at least a couple in here) it wants to be, you have to wonder why you should bother. Special Topics In Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl, out now published by Viking.
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