[Kimbell175113]

Okay, follow up now that I've finished Special Topics in Calamity Physics. This won't really be a review because I loved the book so much that it's hard to be critical.

This book had a fair amount of buzz last year, but here's a synopsis for those who haven't heard about it: Blue van Meer, a hyper-literate teenager, and her father travel around the country, moving every few months as Dad likes to get a temporary teaching gig at one university, then quickly move to the next one. (Mom is long since dead, car accident.) They spend a ton of time memorizing poetry and dialogue and philosophy, watching old movies, and being really academic in general (and the dad also spends time picking up women in every new city).

For Blue's senior year of high school, they move near a private school and plan to stay in one place for a whole year for the first time. She gets caught up in a group of quirky kids (standard for any high school story, I guess) who spend a lot of time with one of the teachers, Hannah Schneider. Hannah is charismatic, mysterious, etc., and then she turns up dead, and then the crazy [censored] starts happening. I don't want to call the book a murder mystery, but it wouldn't be that far off if I did.

The story is not terribly original (ton of parallels to Veronica Mars), but it's expertly done in a Blue's first-person narration. The book is organized as a "Core Curriculum," with each chapter relating to a literary work - and the book ends with a Final Exam for the reader (not cheesy at all, and in fact the ending is one of the story's biggest strengths.)

The biggest draw for me was the style of the narration, which allowed for some great sly jokes. What happens is that everything is cited, referenced, like a term paper, but most of the citations are either boldly made-up or hilariously obtuse and abstract. I'd be reading along, trying to keep up with these characters who are smarter than I am, and then out of nowhere I'm hit with a Jason Takes Manhattan joke. The book is just fun to read, and as I said, I recommend it to anyone (it'd help if you are young and a nerd, though).