![]() ![]() “On the very best of days I was their burden, their bête noire, and so, if you considered Newton’s Third Law of Motion, ‘All actions have an equal and opposite reaction,’ and the five of them spontaneously turned into lil’ Baby Face Nelsons and Dimples, they also had to turn into old Lost Weekends and Draculas, which best describes the looks on their faces in that instance.” As a writer myself, I often asked myself how much time and thought the author put into creating her scintillating sentences and paragraphs, for indeed, they are clever, intelligent, often humorous and always, always artful: So we have a convoluted plot, an iconoclastic structure, and absolutely brilliant writing. Pessl reveals Blue, and the plot, in 36 chapters titled after (and therefore suggestive of) famous novels: Wuthering Heights, A Room With a View, Things Fall Apart, proffering a counterpoint to Pessl’s own novel and, for me, often giving pause to consider the metaphor. ![]() The relationship between Blue, Jade, Charles, Milton, Leulah (and their favorite teacher Hannah), are tenuous although of critical importance to the story. She idolizes him intellectually, and forms no real bonds of friendship until high school. ![]() ![]() Gareth van Meer, Blue’s father, an itinerant professor of physics, by hopping from one college to another, in essence orphans his daughter. ![]()
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