This novel is about a high schooler in Norway, named Sophie, who begins receiving mysterious letters offering a course on Philosophy. I've had it on my reading list since before I used Goodreads. It was a nice review of the Intro to Philosophy course I took in college. About half way through you find out an officer working for the United Nations in Lebanon has written this work of fiction and has sent it home to his daughter Hilde, who is the same age as the fictional Sophie, for her birthday. By this point, I had become invested in the story of Sophie and her Philosophy teacher, so it was a bit frustrating that Sophie's story becomes more and more fantastic, and Hilde's story is about her reading what we have just read. My college course ended with Kant, so I was interested in an overview beyond that period of philosophic thought. The Philosophy teacher in the story begins pulling in other sciences with discussion of Darwin and Freud. More and more mythical and fairy-tale characters strangely pop up in Sophie's world as well. It really leans in to the dual worlds of grounded reality and mysterious fantasy, but I don't think the author mixes them particularly well.
