It Was A Calamity

I don’t understand why Calamity of Physics is called “A GOOD BOOK”. Just because someone can refer to numerous movies, events and OTHER BOOKS, does not make them smart, it makes them a know it all. Know it all’s and smart people are two completely different people. The difference is that smart people, have something to bring to the table. Know it alls, can not survive without information to thrive on. This is what Miss Pessl does, take all of information that really have nothing to do with the book, and shove it down readers throats, tricking them into thinking it is useful information. If you take all the comparisons in the book away, all that’s left is a crappy story and plot that is as follows: A smart girl that keeps moving around with her single parent dad and has trouble fitting in. For some miraculous reason a teacher decides to help her and gets her in with a group of friends, who really cant stand the new kid. The mysterious reason turns out that almost everyone in the book is an assassin and had assassin relationships with each other, and that same reason leads to an assassin assassinating another assassin. That sounds like a terrible Disney movie that never got made, I mean everything’s there, the dead mom at the beginning of the story (all good Disney movies have dead parents, The Little Mermaid, Bambi, The Lion King, Alladin,), the kid who moves from town to town and never has or made any friends (Johnny Tsunami, Cindarella, Snow White, all resort to talking animals), and the awesome surprise ending where everyone’s an assassin. Wait that’s too bad of an ending to put in a movie, might want to just restrict that one to books, because no one will ever end up believing that stuff. That is the way this fictional book comes across, fictional which means unbelievable (Websters Dictionary P.283). Anyone could write like this if they wanted to, for instance write a story where in the ending everyone is actually a SHARK, THAT WOULD TOTALLY BE A SURPRISE. And you would have to compare everything to something else, oh oh I know, sheep sheering. “ He made a sound like a sheep being sheered” or “ I flipped through the pages as if I was sheering a sheep” and the ever popular “ As I sheered the sheep, it reminded me of my sheep sheering days.” That would a great book, I’d call it Hooked on Phoniex : Stop the Addiction. This is how I view this excuse for a book, a mystery novel that may as well be called, “EVERYONE IS AN ASSASSIN” or “MY DAD: THE ASSASSIN” I don’t know where the thought came across Miss Pessl mind when she was trying to develop an ending. It probably hit her when she crossed paths with a real assassin. Or maybe she herself had a interesting love affair with Sean Connery, and wanted to translate it into something less believable. For all I care this book is For Your Eyes Only (1981 John Glenn)