A short book review

I bought Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics just for the title, without knowing a thing about it. It's a little pretentious, a little unrealistic, a little long (at over 500 pages), but overall, I greatly enjoyed it. The premise - a precocious adolescent traveling to small college towns across America with her academic father - mirrors Lolita, but without the pedophilia. The actual plot is a tightly woven murder mystery of the best kind. The clues are all there, artfully hidden among the didactic cross-referencing and other cutesy literary allusions. Pessl's ending doesn't quite tie up all the loose ends; rather she presents all the loose ends and allows you to tie them together however you wish.