Author Marisha Pessl's novel, "Special Topics in Calamity Physics," debuted at No. 6 on The New York Times best-seller list.

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It is, apparently, very easy to hate Marisha Pessl.

She is, first of all, young and attractive, prompting one profiler to liken her to "a Botticelli angel." Then there's her writing talent, rewarded with a six-figure advance for her debut novel. Yes, she's wealthy, too.

And the novel itself? It's a best-seller that The New York Times called "a whirling, glittering, multifaceted marvel, delivered in an irrepressibly smart and flamboyant new voice."

Like we said, it's very easy to hate Marisha Pessl.

"It sounds so cliché to say it feels like a dream, but it really does," says the 28-year-old author in the sleek TriBeCa loft she shares with her husband and two cats.

Her novel, "Special Topics in Calamity Physics," has drawn comparisons with Jonathan Safran Foer, Zadie Smith and Dave Eggers. Now in its fifth printing, it has sold 100,000 copies and debuted at No. 6 on The New York Times best-seller list, staying there for several weeks.

"My goal is to be published, and if I had even a small audience I would have been happy," she says. "I just wanted to have my little voice out there."

"Special Topics" focuses on a precocious, hyper-literate teen named Blue van Meer as she prepares for her senior year of high school in North Carolina after crisscrossing the nation with her college professor dad, a brilliant widower.

It's a lush book, studded with metaphors. A woman's perfume "hung in the air like a battered piñata." A man seems "to hand out smiles like a guy in a chicken suit costume distributing coupons for a free lunch." A girl "looked at me with anxious interest, like I was a dress on sale, the last in her size."

Though the 514-page book — illustrated with more than a dozen of Pessl's own drawings — appears at first to be a humorous account of Blue's attempts to fit in with the cool kids, it soon turns into a thriller, one that ultimately tests the father-daughter bond.

"Almost as soon as I came up with those two characters, I had a vision of those final 20 pages," Pessl says. "I knew what the final outcome of their relationship would be. I knew that the arc of this novel would shift and become tainted and ultimately destroy itself."

Sometimes — as in the case of the "late great Horace Lloyd Swithin (1844-1917), British essayist, lecturer, satirist and social observer" — she simply invents both the quote and the author.

Early on in the writing, Pessl explains, she would search in vain for a specific quotation she wasn't sure existed, burning up hours on the Internet or in the library.

Her solution: Just make it up.

"Some people are so destroyed when they find that out," she says. "One particular reference book that's a favorite that doesn't exist is 'American Strange Ticks of Behavior.' Everyone wants to read that book! I want to read it, frankly."

Pessl was born near Detroit to an Austrian father and an American mother who divorced when Pessl was 3. Growing up in Asheville, N.C., her mother would read to her aloud from the Western canon. She graduated from Barnard College in 1998.

Writing was always a private affair, squeezed in at night while she worked by day as a financial consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers. Graduate school simply wasn't an option.

"Special Topics" isn't technically Pessl's first novel. She wrote two others that failed, in large part because she started writing immediately after getting her ideas.

For her third attempt, Pessl mapped out everything, chapter by chapter, character by character — even using Excel spreadsheets. "I was really anal about it," she says.

Then came a huge risk. About halfway through the writing of the book, her then-boyfriend, Nic Caiano, was transferred to London and said he didn't want to go without her.

So she quit her job and followed, writing full time for the first time.

The couple married in 2003, and the book was finished a year later. Back in New York, Pessl finally sought an outside opinion. After trolling the Internet, she sent e-mails to 10 agents of authors she admired.

"It is a first novel unlike any you will read this year," she wrote in the pitch, which now makes her wince. "It's sort of embarrassing," she says, before reconciling herself: "It's America — you got to go big."

The pitch got attention, but the novel made a bigger impact. Carole DeSanti, an editor at Viking Penguin in New York, was addicted when the manuscript was e-mailed to her, staying up late to read it off the screen.

An auction for the book was held, and Pessl emerged with a hefty advance.

After news of the deal, the book community wanted to learn more about this new literary star. A quick Google unearthed a glossy head shot from her college days, when she dabbled in acting. It would also adorn the book's back cover flap, confirming her comeliness.

Though critics have been almost universal in praise, some have groused that the book is too long and that the second-half thriller seems to come from nowhere.

"My book is meticulous," she says. "It does slow your reading down a bit. You have to slow down to absorb. I wanted to do that to readers. Maybe some people don't like that. And that's OK, too."

Pessl is working on her next book, of which she remains characteristically mum. She also, to her delight, has been getting invitations to writers' conferences, finally meeting other authors.