I'll be honest: I really, really wanted to like "Sophie's World". It seemed right up my proverbial ally: pedantic, but whimsical, presumptuous, but charming ( If "Sophie's World" were a boyfriend, he would be the rebellious prep who has a trust fund but spends all his money taking his friends on trips to the city, cigarettes, and first editions of Sartre and Salinger to give to his girlfriend… but he wouldn't call, and he might have an affair with the TA of his Ethics class, just to be ironic).

I will say that I adore the history of philosophy in novel form. I absorbed about 75% of it, which is more than I could have gained in a classroom. The best explained philosophers were the Greeks, Romans, those of the Hellenistic, Middle Ages, and Renaissance periods, Descartes, Locke, Kant, Kierkegaard, Darwin, Marx, Sartre, and Freud. Hume, Hegel, and Spinoza could have been better explained.

It was not a smart move, in my opinion, to have Alberto, Sophie's teacher, lecture her with a few pointless interjections on her end. I would have preferred that the "mysterious packets" kept arriving, rather than the covert, Lolita-esque meetings that subsequently commenced. The dialogue between Sophie and the adults in her World was forced, strange, and even a tad rude. At the risk of sounding haughty, I'll simply say that I am unfamiliar with Norwegian cultural norms, and it is possible that the relations between adults and children are much more informal than I am used to.

The mystery story itself was undeveloped and much more Carrollian than I had anticipated. The twist made sense (after all, this is a novel about philosophy), but as an avid reader, I worry about what will happen to Alberto and Sophie … even, maybe especially if they are mere figments.