Stuff We Love: Reader's Choice

The Special People Club

Miss your college days of intro-to-lit courses? Special Topics in Calamity Physics (Penguin, $25.99), the first novel from buzz-generating young author Marisha Pessl, is set up like the ultimate syllabus. The prose is punctuated with references to books and movies both real and imagined. In the novel, Blue van Meer recalls her senior year at a North Carolina prep school and her involvement there with the exclusive group orbiting the mysterious film teacher. Blue's recollections of shuttling around the country with her college-professor father call to mind Lolita; her keen observations of the social machinations at St. Gallway High School suggest Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep; and the murder mystery that unfolds during her senior year is pure Hitchcock. Pessl's got a delightfully wacky way with language, a gift for parroting the teenage mania for classification (Blue's father has "bourbon moods," his girlfriends are "June bugs") and a rollicking imagination. And there are pictures, to boot. Yeah, going back to school just got a lot more fun.

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