![]() ![]() (Her mother died in a car crash when Blue was 5.) Dad, a perpetually visiting professor, insists on traipsing from one podunk college to another, where his hands-on specialty in civil and guerrilla wars and frequent publications in small-run journals with titles like Federal Forum and the New Seattle Journal of Foreign Policy lend him a rakish mystique. "Special Topics" is narrated by Blue van Meer, the 16-year-old daughter of Gareth, a sort of itinerant policy wonk. "Special Topics," for all its overeager freshman infelicities, is a real novel, one of substance and breadth, with an arresting story and that rarest of delights, a great ending. "Beneath the foam of this exuberant debut," he writes, "is a dark, strong drink." There's certainly plenty of foam covering the surface of "Special Topics" - in the form of a strenuously antic style and the pretty thin device of titling each chapter after some famous literary work ("Othello," "Madam Bovary," etc.) and proclaiming that the whole book is a "syllabus." But get past the froth, sip a bit deeper, and he's right: The brew is surprisingly potent. ![]() The pre-publication blurb isn't one of the higher forms of literature, but Jonathan Franzen's one-sentence endorsement, printed on the back cover of Marisha Pessl's first novel, "Special Topics in Calamity Physics," is a masterpiece of sorts. ![]()
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