Add it to the list

First installment in an occasional feature in which I tell you what I'm reading, because I'm a librarian-in-training and you're my captive audience.

At my readers' advisory job, under "staff fun" on the intranet, there's a form for writing recommendations that get posted on the library website. The caveat being that the item in question must be part of the collection. This library must not process books as fast as my other one, because I'm already done with this book (from the other library) and it's still showing up as "on order" here, despite there being 27 holds on it. So I can't recommend this book to the masses yet.

But I digress.

I finished reading Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl last night, and it blew my mind. Plot-wise, it doesn't sound particularly amazing -- I suppose it's sort of a mystery/thriller-type novel, which is not normally my cup of tea. The main character, Blue Van Meer, is a high school student whose father is a perpetual visiting professor at a string of unremarkable colleges around the country. In her senior year, he suddenly decides to put down roots, and they end up spending the entire year in the same North Carolina town, where she attends an elite private school and becomes part of a clique of too-cool students and the school's enigmatic film teacher. About halfway through the book the teacher is found hanging from a tree during a clique camping trip, and Blue pulls together all sorts of stuff from the first half of the book in an attempt to solve the mystery of whether her death was suicide or murder.

Nothing in that description sounds mind-blowing, I know. It is suspenseful, to the point where I was even more resentful than usual about having to answer Dead Celebrity Patron's questions because I would have vastly preferred to be on break and finding out what would happen next. But the cool thing about the book is Blue herself; the conceit is that she's writing her autobiography, basically, and because she's the daughter of a professor and extremely well read, the whole narration is littered with references to all sorts of scholarly, literary, and trashy books, movies, and websites, not all of which actually exist. The book is structured like a syllabus for a Great Books class -- each chapter is named for a major literary work, and the epilogue is presented as a final exam, which sounds cheesy but really does work. The whole thing is just really well done, and even though it's long and the first half probably could have been edited down to something more manageable, I read it in less than a week.

(The book jacket copy crosses the line, though. Particularly the movie tag-line-esque slogan that appears on the back cover: "Apply to life at your own risk." Jesus. Someone in the marketing department deserves a good flogging for that one.)