With echoes of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a kind of coming-of-age story for nerds. Sixteen-year-old Blue van Meer is ridiculously smart—she can recite pi out to sixty-five decimal places and prefers to spend her days reading philosophy and memorizing poetry with her father—but when she arrives at St. Gallway, her naiveté becomes painfully evident: human nature, it seems, can’t be reduced to aphorisms and philosphical one-liners. People are a bit more complex than that.

But it’s her very naiveté that makes Blue such a compelling character. Though it’s told in the matter-of-fact tone of a professor giving a lecture, Special Topics in Calamity Physics is anything but dry. Pessl sprinkles her novel with amusing metaphors and little facts, which adds to the book’s overall charm. And then there’s the reading curriculum: each chapter corresponds to a classic of Western literature, from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (which features some of Blue’s sketches) to James Dickey’s Deliverance (which tells of Blue’s fateful camping trip with her friends) to Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (which describes Blue’s hospital stay). (At one point, when Blue is throwing books at her father, he asks her, “Are you finished bombarding your father with the Western canon?”)

Though the novel touches on heavy subject matter—murder, suicide, underage sex—Pessl’s style is light-hearted throughout, which takes the edge off the overall darkness of the story. Like her father, Blue isn’t given to sentimentality or emotional examination. People are frequently reduced to funny nicknames—”June Bugs” for the love-lorn women her father likes to date, “Stern Brow” for one of her nurses after being admitted to the hospital—and serious situations are given levity through Blue’s amusing and erudite comparisons.

One of the most impressive aspects of the book is Pessl’s patience in telling the story. Rather ricocheting from one unexpected revelation to another, the novel unfolds slowly, with Blue calmly guiding readers through her investigation into Hannah Schneider’s death. The plot can be tricky at times, but strong characterization and Blue’s confident, unpretentious voice ensures that readers won’t get lost in the shuffle.