Blue Van Meer lost her mother at a very young age and now hops* around the country with her academic, Clooney-esque* father, a political science professor.

    They decide to spend her senior year of high school in one place — Stockton, North Carolina — where Blue attends a prestigious* private school and attracts the interest of Hannah Schneider, a beautiful and mysterious* film studies teacher who mentors* an exclusive clique* of students, the Bluebloods.

    The closer Blue gets to this group and to Hannah, and the more she uncovers* about a series of mysterious deaths, the more she discovers about her own past.

    Blue is smart and well-read, yet she’s also believably naive, self-critical, self-aggrandizing*.

    The book is organized like a college syllabus* for a literature course. Each chapter is named after a novel that is at least loosely thematically* related (“Wuthering Heights,” “Women in Love,” and so forth) to its contents, and throughout, no source is left uncited.

    Marisha Pessl, born in 1977, completed the novel in 2004 and it was published in 2006 by Viking Penguin to “almost universally positive” reviews. Translated into 30 languages, it was a New York Times best seller.(SD-Agencies)