Working from a table of contents that looks like a syllabus ("Chapter #1: Othello, William Shakespeare"), Marisha Pessl's 500-page debut rolls out the story of her high-school-aged heroine Blue van Meer in annotated chapters that read like research papers. Blue is the young daughter of a widowed political theorist who traverses the country as a perpetual visiting professor. She grows up peerless with The Waste Land committed to memory, reaching her senior year, at the up-market St. Gallway School in North Carolina, with a PhD in precocious awkwardness.

But while her protagonist is anxiously attempting to understand herself, Pessl reveals her own unfaltering confidence. The novel drops playful references to subjects popular, obscure, and even imaginary, as Pessl builds her narrative into a charmingly self-conscious novel that leaps right out of its prep school origins.

Like any good coming-of-age story, Special Topics in Calamity Physics has two plots, the teenage and the adult. The former involves a predictably irritating high school clique called the Bluebloods and a bit of romance that's never acted upon, while the latter involves the murder of a noirish film studies teacher. Anyone who can extract those themes will ace the multiple-choice exam offered in the book's final pages. As for Pessl herself, she aptly clears the hurdle of preciousness on her way to a promising literary career.

-Emily Stone