Tampa

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Celeste Price is an eighth-grade English teacher in suburban Tampa. She’s undeniably attractive. She drives a red Corvette with tinted windows. Her husband, Ford, is rich, square-jawed, and devoted to her. Our story had nothing to do with abuse. To link them is like pouring filth on flowers, like denying the power of love. Ralph Boyd – Putney by Sofka Zinovieff What I could sense in Nutting's writing, was an eagerness to cause the readers to recoil in horror and to make them experience the full impact of being inside a scheming, conniving, good-looking hebephile like Celeste Price's head. As you may know, this deliquescent, oozing and dripping Boylita novel is about as un-pc as you can get. Whereas Mr Nabokov’s brilliant Lolita skirts around the actual sex because that was probably the very last thing our Vlad wanted to write about and also because they would have put him in prison if he had, Tampa revels in every lubricious manoeuvre, every genital twitch, pulse and torque detailed, every orifice given the attention a marine biologist devotes to the life cycle of the sea anemone. These sections are as porny as can be. Two questions then assault the reader –

To me, there's not enough depth--Nutting could have followed up more with the other women characters or even finished it off as Celeste was facing her first sags and bags, oh say around age 50. It's not funny, it's not a psychological thriller, not a crime who-dunnit, I don't even know how to classify it.No one in this book is a fully-realized person, least of all Celeste. A super-hot teacher who drives a Corvette and only desires sex with nerdy boys? Not to be blunt, but Celeste doesn’t feel like a character drawn by an adult. Instead, she comes across as the masturbatory fantasy of an awkward eighth-grader writing terrible erotica while desperately waiting for an invitation to the junior high mixer that will never come. 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.

If I were to rate this book on the writing alone I’d easily give it five stars because it’s impeccable, but instead I’ll go with four because this was a story I didn’t necessarily enjoy. I’ll definitely read more from this author in the future.

https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2021/04/10392755/made-for-love-book-changes-writer-alissa-nutting-interview

When you write about these rare exceptions, it’s like you’re giving aid and comfort to the enemy, you’re giving them this ammunition. When one feminist organised a conference about female paedophilia, other feminists turned up for the sole reason of shouting abuse at her and shutting it all down : Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle was published almost 15 years after Lolita and is another work by Vladimir Nabokov. In this book, there is an illicit love affair between two siblings, though this fact is unbeknownst to them. I have to confess: I quite liked the language. Well, okay, perhaps "like" is the wrong word but I really appreciate crude honesty in books, particularly when the author utilises language the way this author does. I'm not sure we needed such a graphic description of Celeste's vagina and her masturbation methods but, what the hell, it certainly achieved it's purpose with me. And, strange as it may sound, there was an odd beauty to the author's writing that gave a certain artistry to such descriptions. They were gross, naturally, but weirdly poetic. What sets Ada apart from the other titles on this list is that it takes place in an alternate reality on Antiterra. In this version of Earth, there are a large number of Russians residing in North America. Although The End of Alice was published relatively recently in 2007, it caused such a stir that, like Lolita, attempts were made to ban it in the UK.This book has excellent pacing, not too fast, not too slow, which I liked because it gave the reader lots of time for the barbarity of Celeste’s thoughts and actions to sink in. Was it entertaining? Hell, yeah. It was hilarious, in the way that sociopaths can be hilarious with their overriding desire to please themselves at the expense of all others (and specifically, Celeste's inner thoughts about those around her.) The voice of this novel felt so real and so alive, it would be hard to believe that this specific person doesn't actually exist out there, somewhere.

But aside from the creation of this marvellously despicable character I don't spot any other achievement in Nutting's novel.What this book does, above everything else, is make us question the gendered view we have of sexual relationships. We are inside Celeste's mind, getting a good look at how perverted, depraved and even sociopathic she is, so we experience outrage at the way society and the law allow her to escape justice because she is an attractive young woman. There's an assumption still often being made that women are the passive gender in a sexual relationship and that men are natural predators/aggressors. It's hard for us to imagine a woman sexually abusing a man. This question is even asked in the book: "If you were a teenage male, would you call a sexual experience with her abuse?" A teen girl with a male teacher is considered a victim of his evil manipulation - a passive victim without a sexuality of her own coming into play. But a teen boy with a female teacher is victim of nothing more than the perfect teen male fantasy. Can attractive women really be rapists? Isn't Celeste just giving the boys what they want? Doesn't that make it okay? These are the questions one might ask if they weren't living inside her mind. Notes on a Scandal is a Lolita-esque book involving a gender switch as art teacher Sheba begins an affair with one of her 15 year old students. We are told from the very beginning that Sheba has been charged with sexual assault of a minor so there’s no surprise about how this story ends.