Marisha Pessl’s debut novel ‘Special Topics in Calamity Physics,’ not only started a bidding war that earned her a six figure advance,  it debuted at number 6 on The New York Times Bestseller List, which called it “a whirling, glittering, multifaceted marvel, delivered in an irrepressibly smart and flamboyant new voice.”
“Special Topics” focuses on a precocious, hyper-literate teen named Blue van Meer as she prepares for her senior year of high school in North Carolina after crisscrossing the nation with her college professor dad, a brilliant widower.
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It’s a lush book, studded with metaphors. A woman’s perfume “hung in the air like a battered pinata.” A man seems “to hand out smiles like a guy in a chicken suit costume distributing coupons for a free lunch.” A girl “looked at me with anxious interest, like I was a dress on sale, the last in her size.”
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“I’m a people watcher,” Pessl says. “When I’m writing, I do see it very visually, as in a movie. Then it’s simply up to me to describe it through a character.”
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Though the 514-page book — illustrated with more than a dozen of Pessl’s own drawings — appears at first to be a humorous account of Blue’s attempts to fit in with the cool kids, it soon turns into a thriller, one that ultimately tests the father-daughter bond.
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