SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS

Blue Van Meer writes of the year her life “unstitched like a snagged sweater.” This first novel is a hybrid, part coming-of-age story, part murder mystery. But first and foremost, it’s a dazzling prose circus, full of hilarious metaphors and studded with footnotes, some real, many invented. Emily Janice Card (daughter of novelist Orson Scott Card) gives a bravura performance. She’s an innocent, even foolish teenaged girl with the bookishness of an Oxford don. Card dances through this minefield of a text, never getting lost in a sentence or mispronouncing a word. The absence of the drawings present in the text is noticeable but in no way mars this spirited aural romp. B.H.C. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine [Published: JUN/ JUL 07]