Blue van Meer is the precocious teenage narrator of this whodunit that masquerades, for a greater part of the book, as a deposition on American McCulture and Great works of Literature before returning to its initial premise. Blue, who owes her singular name to her mother’s love of Lepidoptera, is brought up by her widowed father, Gareth, an itinerant Professor who refuses to be tied down to any one University for long. As they together traverse the American countryside Gareth educates his daughter through his “Sonnet-a-thons”. As Blue explains: “It was One Hundred Miles of Solitude: Attempting to Memorize The Waste Land. Dad could meticulously divide a state end to end, not into equal driving shifts but into rigid half-hour segments of Vocabulary Flash Cards (words which every genius should know), Author Analogies (“the analogy is the Citadel of thought: the toughest way to condition unruly relationships”), Essay Recitation (followed by a twenty-minute question-and-answer period), War of the Words (Colerdige/Wordsworth face-offs), Sixty Minutes of an Impressive Novel (selections included The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald, 1925) and The sound and the Fury (Faulkner, 1929) and The van Meer Radio Theater Hour, featuring such plays as Mrs. Warren’s Profession (Shaw 1894), The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde, 1895) and various selections from Shakespeare’s oeuvre, including the late romances.”

Two conclusions can be drawn from the above: American highways are easy to manoeuvre, and Pessl can write an interminably long sentence. The book is, in fact, stuffed full with winding sentences, bursting with literary references (many created by the author herself), weighted with metaphors and similes (at times, as many as three in one sentence) for that is the way the bookish protagonist processes her world. Ahem! Despite Gareth’s use of Classics as torture tools, Blue worships her father and takes a rather mature view of his shamelessly philandering ways, even labelling his various women, “June Bugs”.

When Gareth decides to take a teaching assignment at St. Gallway School, Blue ends up joining a group of students nicknamed Bluebloods for their astonishing looks and pedigree. The Bluebloods collectively worship at the feet of one Hannah Schneider, the Films teacher, and gather at her place weekly for meal and homework. Pessl portrays Hannah as a mysterious creature, full of allure, yet shifty. Despite a lot of space devoted to Hannah and her precious brood, the final effect is unconvincing – Hannah is no Mata Hari. The book’s leitmotif, unintended, seems to be: hyperbole. The characters are exaggerated: the Bluebloods seem to be an extreme form of the kids from The OC while Gareth looks like George Clooney, has the sensibility of Guevara and the brains of Einstein; the language is extravagantly superfluous; the narrative loopy. The story seems to be heading nowhere until a murder happens, then another. Finally, in the last 200 pages, the read becomes a gallop.

Which kind of makes you wonder what Pessl was doing with the first 300–odd pages? Sure, Blue is a brilliant kid brought up on a diet of Classics but endless literary references – whether to Argos, the dog who recognizes Odysseus on his return home, or Dante’s love, Beatrice Portinari – and Blue’s verbosity distract the reader, ultimately disrupting the narrative flow. Excessive use of capitals, another trait favoured by Hot Young Authors, is in abundant irritating display. Pessl’s use of sketches as “Visual Aids” may seem gimmicky but provide relief in a textually-bloated narration.

That Pessl is talented is evident but Calamity Physics is buried under her erudition (apparently the writer’s bookish mother was always reading aloud to her and made reading lists for her daughter’s summer holidays). Perhaps she should have restrained her desire to stuff all her knowledge between the covers of her first novel. Ultimately, the hype outruns the book