Blue van Meer is a smart high school student on her way to Harvard who has spent most of her life alone with her father after a tragic accident took her mother's life early in Blue's childhood. Her father, a professor of political science, moves across the country to teach at small colleges for short periods of time, allowing Blue the opportunity to grow up as somewhat of a vagabond. By the time they reach the destination of which the book is about, Blue is unlike most kids her age. Her life has been spent in one town after another with only her father and his lectures as the remaining constant. She seems wise beyond her years having read a variety of different books likely found boring by her contemporaries - or the contemporaries of her father, for that matter.

The book is Blue's somewhat lengthy memory of the year that "changed her life", the introduction to a teacher who "made a difference" and a small group of tight-knit friends who were aloof, exclusive and downright snotty. This is acceptance (or something vaguely resembling acceptance by a girl who had never known such a thing in her life) is what ultimately makes the girl fall and break into a million little pieces. There is an underlying mystery that appears on page one, rears its head throughout the 500+ pages and sort of comes to a wrap near the end.

I am equally fascinated by and disgusted with young up-and-coming writers who appear out of the blue with this huge novel that sits on bestseller lists for months or years, with claims that it is "fresh" and "original" and "groundbreaking". This book is not quite any of the above; rather it pays homage (most likely unconsciously) to previous books like Donna Tartt's The Secret History or (god-save-you Marisha Pessl) The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Young Pessl constructs each chapter around the title of a classic work (ie, Moby Dick - a chapter in which a large man drowns in a pool; The Woman in White - in which Blue and her father are first confronted by the "fabulous" Hannah Schneider, the teacher that changes Blue's life for better or worse, etc. - a technique that sort of lends itself to be somewhat interesting) and the pages are filled with references and footnotes and rather pretentious ramblings.

The writing itself is not horrible, but smells of creative writing workshops (very unlikely the Iowa Writer's Workshop). The story was unbelievable in a setting that tried to feel like it could be believable, with characters the writer perhaps knew - but most likely characters the writer wished she had known. Sadly.

I wanted to like it. I tried hard to like it. I thought about it long after in order to force myself to like it. While it will stick in my head for a long time, it is most comparable to a Backstreet Boys song that won't leave my mind. And I blame James Joyce for it, and Dave Eggers for making it seem like Joyce was qualified.

I've read other reviews and I believe the negative reviews have been written by people who didn't take time to really read the book and follow it all the way through. It would be easy to do. It's not a book you can speed read. (See Ulysses by James Joyce) Sometimes I'll tear through a good book in a couple of days. But there is so much in this book that you have to take your time to really comprehend it and get the good stuff out of it. Marisha's writing technique is totally unique with her hundreds of references to great works of fiction, movie stars, reference books, and other explanations of behavior. I laughed and enjoyed perhaps 60 percent of these and whipped through some of them, not quite following but knowing they'd be worth studying if I were retired and had more time.

Basically, this is a coming of age story. The main character, Blue, has been raised by an intellectual professor who is always on the move dragging her around the country to different jobs with different universities. Her mother died when she was very young, so her only deep relatinship is with her father. And it is a very touching and loving relationship. She becomes his "Mini Me" in many ways. They land for her senior year in a very high end private school and as she is maturing and pulled into a group of "cool" kids by a very interesting and eccentric female teacher, her life starts to change as she tries to become a "cool" teenager, to date and party, to become more than a smart but nerdy professor's perfect little daughter.

As all of this happens, she starts to realize that her father has a few flaws, has been having flings with women and treating them poorly, that he has lied about some of his meetings with other professors and that there may be some kind of secret second life going on.

There is murder, disappearances, first sexual experiences, shyness, embarassing moments of being young and tongue-tied in front of a class, but more than anything, there is the touching love of a young girl for her father, and then how she deals with some unexpected, heart wrenching blows to her life.

Throughout the book, there were dozens and dozens of laugh out loud moments excellent insights into relationships and the little things that make us tick. And even though much of the book was somewhat tongue in cheek, the main themes came through to me loud and clear and when I finally finished up after re-reading the introduction (a must unless you have a photographic memory) I put the book down, sad that I was finished and hoping that there will be some kind of follow up.

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This book is a lot to take in. Unfortunately, for me it went from a solid 5-star to a lukewarm 3-star in the last 20%. Full review to come.

4.75 ⭐

The day I picked this book to read, I've only put it down when I slept, took a nap, or spiralled into 40 mins long social media hole. Other than that, I WAS HOOKED ONTO THIS, DEVOURING PAGES AFTER PAGES LIKE A FIEND POSSESSED.

Being in Blue van Meers head was such a pleasurable experience. She references books and pop culture like an average millennial references memes. I loved her stoic, yet emotional nature so much. Being a person who smells the plot twist miles away, the turn of events in this book literally RKO'ed me out of nowhere. I seriously didn't see it coming until I was on that chapter. I loved Marisha Pessl's Night Film a lot, and I'm glad I adored this book just as much.

The only issue I had with this is that the main character read Tolstoy in first grade. I'm sorry. No.

This one is going back on the pile. I made it over 100 pages this time. That's something, right?

My problems with this book are the glacial pace and overwritten sentences. It's like an even more wordy Donna Tartt book. I don't need literary references cited in every paragraph and overblown dialogue and flowery language for the sake of flowery language don't impress me at this stage in the game. The pretentious, pompous tone of the book is also a turn-off. Picking up the book to read it began feeling like a chore before I finally threw in the towel.

I'm a man with a finite lifespan and thus a finite amount of books I'll be able to read before I reach the clearing at the end of the path. I think I'll go read something more engaging.

This was a weird case of having high expectations and having no expectations, and being disappointed in one and reasonably well satisfied in the other. Overall, though, I didn't like it, and found it to be pretty obnoxious.

The best way to introduce this one is to use the blurb off the back:

Calamity Physics: The resulting explosion of energy, light, heartbreak and wonder as Blue van Meer enters a small, elite school in a sleepy mountain town. Blue's highly unusual past draws her to a charismatic group of friends at St. Gallway (see page 2, "wild, wayward youths," Everyman Parenting) and their captivating teacher, Hannah Schneider. A sudden drowning, a series of inexplicable events, and finally the shocking death of Hannah herself lead to a confluence of mysteries. And Blue is left to make sense of it all with only her gimlet-eyed instinct and cultural lexicon to guide her.

As usual, it's pretty vague, so I'll just expand on a few of those points: "unusual past" probably refers to her upbringing: dragged around the country by her dad, a university professor specialising in civil wars, whose idea of fun driving games is to get his daughter to memorise The Waste Land or recite essays. Her dad is extremely opinionated, in that my-word-is-the-only-truth kind of way, and Blue regurgitates him line for line, word for word, throughout the book. The very first line begins with "Dad always said...", something that pops up in one grammatical form or another on every bloody page, sometimes more than once.

Her mother, Natasha, is dead (her car hit a tree when Blue was about 5), leaving her only child in the hands of a self-obsessed, womanising, pedantic, obnoxious prat - at least, that was how I saw him. Several other characters comment on how Blue talks about nothing but her dad, and I have to say, that doesn't do Blue any favours as a Sympathetic Main Character.

By "her highly unusual past draws her to a charismatic group of friends..." Well, I can't say what "draws" her to them - except that I didn't get the sense that there was this connection from her point of view, it was all Hannah's doing - because that would be giving something away, but the group wasn't very charismatic. I didn't buy them. They were a boring bunch, elevated to the status of "Bluebloods" (meant to be ironic?) by the other students at the school, simply by being constantly gossiped about. YAWN. More irritation. What didn't fit for me was that, with all Blue's intelligence, why would she hang out with them? They were so mean to her, all the time. That in itself would actually make for an interesting story, but it's never really explained or delved into. I know, I remember, it's easy to get stuck in shitty friendships-that-aren't, like you can get stuck in a relationship that just makes you miserable. But still.

Blue analyses and references everything - and I mean everything, she can't get through a description of someone putting on their coat without getting sidetracked into personality type and simile. Sometimes even with footnotes. It was interesting at first - Messl has a way with words, certainly, and Blue's voice doesn't flag for the entire 514 pages - but by page 400 I was getting pretty impatient and started skimming all the asides, tangents, diversions, pit stops, drive-throughs, excursions that constitute the majority of the book. Take them all out, and you've got maybe 200 pages of rather strange mystery book. The blurb itself contains an example of her "referencing" style, which was an interesting literary device, using the titles or made-up books or their equally fictional chapters to describe a person's attitude or emotion etc.

The references themselves are deceptive. Some are real, obviously so, but the majority appear to be fabricated. I say "appear", because you never know, but out of curiosity I tried looking for some of them, even a poet she quotes, but no luck. If it's not on the internet...

As for the plot, it totally did not go where I was expecting. I thought it would be harmless enough, and mostly at face value - I believed in Hannah's depression precisely because Blue ignored it, I thought the photos of the little girl in Hannah's bedroom were of Hannah's child, dead or lost, because it never occured to Blue, and this seemed even more plausible when articles about disappearing children are found in Hannah's garage. And I believed she had committed suicide.

But no, it's far more complicated than that, and all the clues are in the story (and in the tiresome daddy and Hannah quotes), if you have enough patience to wade through it all over again, which you just might, cause it all seems so ... bloated. Far-fetched, yes, but like they say, the more farfetched, the more plausible it really is. I don't know who says that, but it goes something like that I think. And the ending, that I really didn't expect. But I was right about her dad.

If I was really clever, or wanted to appear really clever, I'd have written this in the same style, just to show-off, y'know. But that would be really wanky, and one Blue is more than enough. To give you a taste, this is what the book is like as a reading experience:

Dad always paused here for dramatic effect, staring across the room at the trite little daisy landscape hanging on the wall, or the pattern of horse heads and riding crops running up and down the faded dining room wallpaper. Dad adored all Suspensions and Silences, so he could feel everyone's eyes madly running all over his face like Mongol armies in 1215 sacking Beijing.

That one wasn't too bad - certainly very visually stimulating; I'm building up...
She pressed PLAY on the answering maching ("You have no new messages") and squinted at June Bug Dorthea Driser's ugly cross-stich quotations hanging in rows along the wall by the telephone ("Love Thy Neighbor," "To Thine Own Self Be True").

Try this one: If this narrative were a quotidian account of the history of Russia, this chapter would be a proletarian's account of the Great October Soviet Socialist Revolution of 1917, if a history of France, the beheading of Marie Antoinette, if a chronicle of America, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth.

It's not that it isn't new, or even clever, 'cause it is. It's that it gets so tiresome, with little happening in-between long, long pages (I know I've said "long, long pages" in previous reviews, so I guess I'm not keen on them), of introspective meanderings and quotes of Almighty Dad which just show that Blue isn't the independent free-thinker that she thinks she is. This one took me way too long to read, and, as if often the case, the more Blue analysed and delved and contemplated and rehashed, the more distanced and estranged I felt.

just like everyone else who has read ‘the secret history,’ i have been chasing the elusive feeling that book created ever since. and this comes close… ish.

there are a lot of ways to spot that this is a debut novel - primarily the superfluous descriptions, awkward dialogue, and weak ending - but i still found this to be entertaining. not in the all-consuming way of ‘the secret history,’ but in a simple engaging way that makes a good book.

i liked the coming-of-age narrative, the intellectual vibes, and the mystery of it all. i think if a reader commits to the story and takes their time, they will find the story worth while. but i understand that this requires a lot of effort and patience for accepting the story for what it is (which is dense), so it definitely wont be for everyone.

↠ 3.5 stars

Una scuola in una cittadina in montagna, un’insegnante affascinante e misteriosa e cinque ragazzi appartenenti a un gruppo esclusivo, quello dei Sangueblu: è questo l’inizio di “Teoria e pratica di ogni cosa”, il romanzo d’esordio di Marisha Pessl. Un inizio molto - forse troppo - simile a quello di “Dio di illusioni”. Il romanzo prende poi una piega diversa da quella del libro di Donna Tartt: diventa più incalzante, con indagini e colpi di scena e un finale che lascia molto sorpresi.
 
“Teoria e pratica di ogni cosa” è un misto tra thriller, romanzo di formazione, romanzo di denuncia della società americana e romanzo di riflessione, se così vogliamo chiamarla, sulla vita.
Il primo aspetto, quello di thriller, emerge nella seconda metà, quando la protagonista, una studentessa di nome Blue, cerca di svelare il mistero che si cela dietro alla morte dell’insegnante Hannah - morte annunciata fin dalla prima pagina, per cui non si tratta di uno spoiler - e si immerge in una serie di indagini piene di colpi di scena.
Come romanzo di formazione, invece, il libro descrive il forte cambiamento che ha Blue nel corso di un solo anno - l’ultimo anno di liceo, in cui si trova coinvolta nel gruppo di Sangueblu e nella morte di Hannah. Blue è una ragazza diversa, sotto vari punti di vista: orfana di madre, è molto legata al padre, con cui ha fatto numerosi traslochi nel corso degli anni, e ha una cultura vastissima grazie alla formazione che le ha dato il padre, docente di scienze politiche. Blue si trova, all’inizio dell’anno scolastico, in preda a un conflitto interiore: da un lato, prova il desiderio di conformarsi, facendosi degli amici e costruendosi una vita sociale; dall’altro, sente il bisogno, trasmessole dal padre, di emergere, di distinguersi. Gli eventi che hanno luogo durante l’ultimo anno di liceo le consentono di sperimentare le due strade e di capire meglio il tipo di persona che vuole essere.
Per quanto riguarda l’aspetto di denuncia, Marisha Pessl ci mostra una società americana superficiale ed eccessivamente sicura di sè: quasi tutti i personaggi sono convinti di conoscere la verità su chi li circonda e, invece, non fanno che prendere abbagli. Il romanzo è costellato da più versioni di una stessa verità, versioni che vengono corrette e ricorrette fino a un finale che per molti è deludente ma che è in linea con lo scopo del libro - quello di mostrare quanto è difficile scoprire la verità.
Infine, il romanzo vuole riflettere, come indica il titolo, sul contrasto tra teoria e pratica di ogni cosa, ovvero della vita. I capitoli contengono momenti di teoria, tratti da libri o da convinzioni di alcuni personaggi, ad altri di vita vissuta e ci mostra come anche la cultura più vasta non sia sufficiente ad affrontare la vita vera.
 
Sono arrivata a questo romanzo perché mi è stato suggerito da molte persone che, come me, hanno amato “Dio di illusioni” e, a posteriori, devo dire che è stato l’approccio sbagliato. Mi aspettavo un romanzo dalla prosa elegante, alla Tartt, e dalla grande introspezione psicologica e invece ho trovato tutt’altro: un romanzo molto meno ambizioso, scritto con uno stile estremamente semplice e con personaggi, ad eccezione di Blue e di suo padre, poco indagati e molto stereotipati. Con questo non voglio dire che sia un romanzo da evitare: è un romanzo che intrattiene grazie al tono ironico ed è molto originale per via della struttura. Il libro, infatti, è scritto a posteriori da Blue e strutturato come un corso universitario, in base al consiglio del padre di Blue secondo cui “nulla è più avvincente di un rigoroso corso scolastico”: ogni capitolo ha il titolo di un libro e contiene diverse teorie, con le citazioni dei libri da cui sono tratti, il che rende la lettura più arricchente e interessante. Si tratta però, nel complesso, di un romanzo d’intrattenimento: piacevole, coinvolgente, ma niente di più. Un libro, insomma, lontano anni luce dal grande romanzo d’esordio di Donna Tartt.

Sometimes you really really want to love a book you picked and that book just doesn't love you back and that's how I feel about Special Topics In Calamity Physics.
Ambitious, smart and overdrawn, I just drifted in and out of it.
Pessl is definitely a talented writer but I might just not be the right reader for her books.

If the whimsy of "Bonjour Tristesse" met & mated with all that malignant student magic from "The Secret History" this would be their child. This Gen-Nexter novel holds the pulse of the zeitgeist under its overachieving, overintelligent finger and lets it be known: this is the novel for our generation, for the eager me!me!&onlyme!s. The heroine is such a brat, the reader often remembers past characters like these: uberegotist humanoids--selfish to the extreme, & SMILES--here is their side of the story (indeed, I know of one or two overachieving, overintelligent high schoolers which still instantly make me cringe). That the young characters loathe and are still wholly attracted to the poor, poor teacher--that the ending is as bleak and miserable as an empty box... this is the new B. E. Ellis for sure. (A better one, actually, since this is, in effect, TODAY.)

An instant modern classic!