This was the most unusual and interesting book I read in 2008. I really loved the story, told in 1st person by the teenage narrator, Blue Van Meer. Her voice is unique, and the style of the "memoir" is a course outline, with each chapter titled as a book title, and each paragraph being heavily annotated with references to all sorts of works of fiction, non-fiction, and reference works.

The story is about the relationship between Blue and her controlling and opinionated father; it is also about her coming of age while spending her last year of high school at a private school in North Carolina.

Per New York Times (8/26/06)
The novel is about a precocious adolescent, Blue van Meer, and her widowed father, Gareth, a brilliant, charismatic professor. The two live a peripatetic existence, traveling from college to college, driven by forces only revealed to Blue by the death of Hannah, a popular teacher at her school.

Blue is relentlessly intellectual, making incessant literary references, whether to Argos, the dog who recognizes Odysseus on his return home, or Dante’s love, Beatrice Portinari. Then there is “the late great Horace Lloyd Swithin (1844-1917), British essayist, lecturer, satirist and social observer” who, like a number of authors cited by Blue, was invented by Ms. Pessl.

“She filters every life experience she has through books,” Ms. Pessl said last week of her main character. “A lot of the references are tongue-in-cheek.”

The chapters are also named after great books like “Madame Bovary” and “Howl.” ”I didn’t name the chapters to be intimidating,” Ms. Pessl said. “Being assigned those books and having to trudge through them is as much a rite of passage as going to the prom.” The book is illustrated by the author’s teenage-style drawings.