A few years ago I read [b:Night Film|18770398|Night Film|Marisha Pessl|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1397425352s/18770398.jpg|15182838] and quite enjoyed what a cinematic writer Pessl seemed to be. I was not disproven with this novel, her first. I think I liked it much more than Night Film, actually.

At first the constant lit/film references might seem too much. I remember when I first started reading it and sighing when I guessed that perhaps this book was so long because it relied so much on these references padding out the page count. There were times when I needed to read ahead, skipping references so that I could get to the plot. The references slowed down something that could have been rapid-fire twisty plotting.

Perhaps that's what the plot needed, though, because by the end I was in awe of the journey Pessl carved out for her reader (and narrator, Blue). The novel is about Blue van Meer, a girl who moves almost every year of her young life with her father, a professor (totally related to this as a kid that grew up in the Army, btw). She lands in Stockton, NC in her senior year and meets an enigmatic film teacher and a crew of students that worship said teacher. There are a lot of great sequences in the book (Pessl is really great at tension and illustrating a scene like its a film), and so many that felt true to teenage emotions and interactions. There's also a lot that is completely and totally not reality-based (including some of the references, I might add, that I tried looking up on Goodreads only to find no such book existed - that made me laugh out loud). Anyway, the academia coming-of-age send-up you thought you were reading becomes something quite different by book's end and I was completely in love with it in the final chapters.

Highly recommend for patient readers who like surprise endings. Even with the surprises in the end, I feel like I'll come back to this book in a year or two to read again.