Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Special Topics in Calamity Physics is the story of a young girl named Blue. When Blue is very young her mother passes away and her life becomes a journey from one small college to another. Her father is a professor whose method of dealing with the death is to take a new faculty position every semester. Blue is a brilliant child and moving from place to place doesn't hurt her education, especially since her father teaches her Shakespeare's sonnets instead of "The Wheels on the Bus" and she reads scholarly works as opposed to fairy tales.

The majority of the action takes place during Blue's senior year of high school. Her father has decided to stay in one place for the entire year and enrolls her in an exclusive private school. In the first week of the semester Blue is reluctantly recruited to join a group of 5 students whose lives practically revolve around the enigmatic film teacher, Hannah. At first Blue is not accepted by the other students, they merely tolerate her presence because Hannah insists. Eventually Blue begins to come out of her shell and enjoys being a part of the group. Unfortunately, strange things begin to happen and Blue begins to dig deeper into the mystery of Hannah.

The novel ends after Hannah pushes the group into an ill-fated camping trip and Blue becomes obsessed with investigating Hannah's death. Her findings are amazing and there is a fantastic twist at the end of the novel. By the way, Hannah's death is not a spoiler. Blue tells us that Hannah died on the second page of the novel.

I was drawn to this novel because of the title and the chapter titles. Each one is named after a literature classic that is thematically related to the action in that chapter. I almost put the book down because of the sometimes too frequent citations that Blue used during her narrative, but I powered through them and am glad that I did.

I give this book 4 classics -- the citations slowed me down but the story kept me interested and I did love the twist at the end. The border collie gives this a box of milkbones because the citations made him think this was a scholarly work instead of a silly novel. The big black dog didn't finish the book because she ran out of ritalin and couldn't stay focused. The cat also did not finish because the big black dog wouldn't leave her alone.