In Alissa Nutting’s novel Tampa, Celeste Price, a smoldering 26-year-old middle-school teacher in Florida, unrepentantly recounts her elaborate and sociopathically determined seduction of a 14-year-old student. Celeste has chosen and lured the charmingly modest Jack Patrick into her web. Jack is enthralled and in awe of his eighth-grade teacher, and, most importantly, willing to accept … to accept Celeste’s terms for a secret relationship—car rides after dark, rendezvous at Jack’s house while his single father works the late shift, and body-slamming erotic encounters in Celeste’s empty classroom. In slaking her sexual thirst, Celeste Price is remorseless and deviously free of hesitation, a monstress of pure motivation. She deceives everyone, is close to no one, and cares little for anything but her pleasure.
Tampa is a sexually explicit, virtuosically satirical, American Psycho–esque rendering of a monstrously misplaced but undeterrable desire. Laced with black humor and crackling sexualized prose, Alissa Nutting’s Tampa is a grand, seriocomic examination of the want behind student / teacher affairs and a scorching literary debut.
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This book appears to tell it like it is. Gives the feeling of being more fact than fiction. Don’t read it if you are a prude, as it pulls no punches. Very explicit.
This novel about a female sexual predator who has an obsession with 14 year old boys is brave, confronting, original and very well written. The protagonist Celeste Price is extremely well portrayed – narcissistic, self-centred, ruthless in pursuing her desires, she horrifies us and makes us cringe, but we still have to keep reading.
The …
This was an interesting story about a man who had achieved a great deal in life, and then sowed the seeds of his own destruction. His conviction that he shouldn’t be punished for his crimes was not met with much sympathy by me, and he ultimately came across as unlikable. He blamed others for his problems, when it was clear he was his own worst …
I was a little surprised this was offered. It seemed to be more of an XX rated book than anything. Guess I was expecting something a little different.