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Outstanding
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Los Angeles Times Hillary Frey
Anything familiar about this hip, ambitious and imaginative book is easily overshadowed by its many pleasures. The book's real brilliance doesn't become clear until the very end.
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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
A sincere and uniquely twisted look at love, coming of age and identity. [22 May 2006, p.27]
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Outstanding
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USA Today Olivia Barker
Dazzling...But the real star of the doorstop-weighty tome is the nimble prose. Pessl's talent for verbal acrobatics keeps the pages flipping with minimal effort.
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Outstanding
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LA Weekly Nathan Ihara
It’s edgy, earnest, smart, delicious, moody, melodramatic and, best of all, humble...Pessl skillfully blends high-school hijinks (romantic antics, catty gossip, sex and booze) with tantalizing suspense, and the pages fly by.
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Outstanding
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The New York Times Janet Maslin
This book’s gradual upward trajectory leads it toward mounting suspense, a hall-of-mirrors finale and a coda that is supremely inspired. In the guise of asking questions, Ms. Pessl resoundingly answers a big one: yes, she knew precisely what she was doing all along.
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Outstanding
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The New York Times Book Review Liesl Schillinger
This skylarking book will leave readers salivating for more.
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Outstanding
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The Independent Scarlett Thomas
One of the most astonishing things about this novel is the prose itself, and it is almost alarming that Marisha Pessl is able to sustain the intensity of Blue's narration for over 500 pages.
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Outstanding
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Salon Laura Miller
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.
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Outstanding
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Daily Telegraph Matt Thorne
The true brilliance of Pessl's début is the way she manages to sneak so many clues right in front of the reader while appearing to be writing a fairly scattershot comedy.
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Outstanding
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Daily Telegraph Daniel Swift
A terrific novel: funny, sad and self-aware. But if it knowingly alludes to Lolita and Pale Fire, that is only because it also knowingly alludes to everything from Thucydides to Gordon Gekko. Pessl has written a story about the expectations that arise from literary borrowing: she plays with citation, yet is very sincere.
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Favorable
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London Review Of Books Joanna Biggs
In fact, it’s fun, and funny. And it’s difficult not to like a main character endowed with one-line-aheadness, who can still ruin a moment so entirely and regularly.
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Favorable
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The Onion A.V. Club
Pessl goes a little over the top with her fake literary references, and she sometimes stalls the narrative too long in order to follow dead ends in Blue's love life, or to share Gareth's professional cynicism. But she knows her way around a simile - like "she'd resolved to shake me off like a hit funnybone" - and she knows how to evoke the wrenching feeling of being alternately let into and shut out of a social circle.
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Favorable
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The New Yorker
Her mesmeric tale, even at its most over-the-top, feels true to the operatic agonies of adolescence.
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Favorable
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New York Observer Regina Marler
A wordy, funny book, crowded with closely observed details and jokey literary references that veer into the kind of brainy silliness you could imagine from postgraduates huffing helium.
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Favorable
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Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
A 514-page escapist extravaganza packed with literary and pop culture allusions, mischievous characterizations, erotic intrigue, murders, and unstoppable (occasionally unruly) narrative energy.
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Favorable
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Boston Globe Caroline Leavitt
It's too clear that Pessl is expertly pulling the strings, which makes the whole world of the novel feel a little too signed, sealed, and delivered for the reader's total satisfaction. But while the structure and plot are familiar, the writing is almost nerve- rackingly original.
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Favorable
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Christian Science Monitor Yvonne Zipp
While reading Calamity Physics, hyperawareness of the words sometimes makes it hard to simply sink into the story. Yet that won't prevent readers from marveling at Pessl's inventiveness.
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Favorable
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Booklist Michael Cart
Turns into a murder mystery that--although never as Hitchcockian as its publisher claims--is, nevertheless, almost compelling enough to warrant its excessive length. [1 June 2006, p.39]
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Favorable
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Kirkus Reviews
The writing is clever, the text rich with subtle literary allusion. But while even the gimmicks work well (chapters are structured like a literature syllabus; hand-drawn visual aids appear throughout), they don't compensate for the fact that "The Secret History" came first. [1 June 2006, p.541]
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Mixed
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Village Voice Darren Reidy
But we have to wait some 300 pages for Physics to become a surprisingly seductive thriller. Until then, it's pretty standard coming-of-age stuff of the John Hughes variety.
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Mixed
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Kathleen Byrne
Inside Marisha Pessl's fat, funny, first novel is its thin, witty cousin, desperate to get out of clown face and into something a little more . . . soignée. And what else is an editor for?
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Mixed
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The Economist
A book to chuckle over and chuck away.
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Mixed
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The Independent Wendy Brandmark
The prose can be funny and sharp, but there are too many references; almost every turn of the novel is likened to a character, book, film or essay. She doesn't need to keep pointing out connections.
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Mixed
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The Guardian Peter Dempsey
The initially droll bibliographical referencing, there to show Blue's pedantic nature and her father's influence, quickly becomes wearisome, but it is the style that is the novel's biggest failing. Baldly put, Pessl has a tin ear for prose. There is a page-by-page cascade of dreadful extended metaphors and distractingly inappropriate similes.
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Mixed
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Washington Post Donna Rifkind
Having already aced the test of novel-writing as a literary trivia game, the real work for Pessl begins now, if she dares to stop making glib comparisons and starts to stare directly at things, as only she can describe them.
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Mixed
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San Francisco Chronicle Ann Cummins
For a murder mystery of this length, I want a little more thrill in the story. Special Topics in Calamity Physics could have used some judicious editing, some attention to scene choreography, and a little more glue to hold the plot together.
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