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Totally Unexpected
“This book was amazing. I will admit that it was slow at first, but then completely picks up the pace. This is one of those books that you find out something that rocks the world of the novel and then find out more and more. It keeps surprising you. ”
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-10-27. -
Like A Tough Semester, Worth The Effort
“Rarely have I come across a new book that divides readers so thoroughly in their opinions. This one truly seems to fall into the love-it-or-really-really-hate-it category, and it's not hard to see why. I totally sympathize with those who find it obnoxious, pretentious, slow, implausible, and unforgivably overwritten. More than once in the early going I thought about putting it down for good. And yet, I'm very glad it stuck with it. By the end, I had essentially fallen in love with Blue and was totally captivated by her mystery. The ambiguity of the conclusion is a strength more than a weakness, in my view. I will certainly be interested to see what Ms. Pessl comes up with next. ”
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-09-22. -
Relief!
“Wow, what a relief! I finally decided to quit on this book, and felt much better. I'm a very tolerant and forgiving omnivore when it comes to reading, but this pretentious novel made me so tired... Pessl embellishes EVERY sentence with 'witty repartee', footnotes and random quotes, which annoyed me to no end. The characters are shallow and wooden, droning on and on. Worst of all: 'Special Topics' is elitist, snobby and pretentious. Blue and her Daddy are struggling geniuses in a world of stupidity. (Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn; William James "Will" Durant, The Story of Philosophy: the Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers, 1926.)
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-09-17.
Quote from the book:
"Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last."
Can't believe the editors and critics let her get away with this! Remember the story of the Emperor's clothes? Pessl has a whole warehouse. ” -
A redo of "I Capture the Castle"
“I liked the book overall. I thought the editor did well to help Marisha Pessl end the novel without disappointing us. This book has been compared to Donna Tartt's "A Secret History". I think is surpasses it and should be compared to Dodie Smith's "I Capture the Castle", but then I'm a pediatrician and love coming of age stories. Pessl's very fizzy "pop rocks" invented references piquently scattered throughout the text make me laugh. Like the "Stasi" the counterculture of the 60's is getting a facelift from the youngsters who only read about it. We who lived it know how disorganized everything was. I longed for order. Like Blue.”
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-09-07. -
Blue Heroine
“This was a good novel, not great. The first 70 pages sort of set the tone and background but it really starts to pick up around page 210. You have to have a little patience with the story. Fortunately, I did. I finished this in about a month, which is quick for me these days, so it must have kept some of my interest. The story has elements that have been done before - coming of age for wallflower intellectual, fish out of water, teacher as life's role model - but the way Pessl writes Blue's voice, I did find interesting and sympathetic.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-09-01.
I thought the endless citations were way over done and irritating after awhile. One star taken off for that and also one star taken off for not being edited properly. At least 75-100 pages could have been chopped off. If you can somehow get past that, it becomes an enjoyable, though not really unpredictable story.
It will be interesting to read Pessl's next novel. I hope she doesn't take the easy way out and write in the first person (way overdone).”
