Tampa
By: Alissa Nutting
“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 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.” (as pulled from http://www.amazon.com/Tampa-Alissa-Nutting-ebook/dp/B00AXY3GQS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1391196413&sr=8-1&keywords=Tampa)
My reading experience:
I was actually waiting for this book to come out for a while now. One of my fiction writing professors in college had told us about it when we finished reading Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls (which I loved [and can be found at http://www.amazon.com/Unclean-Women-Girls-Alissa-Nutting-ebook/dp/B00CSCNOYC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1391196687&sr=8-1&keywords=unclean+jobs+for+women+and+girls]) and I knew I was going to have to read it. I am a huge fan of Alissa Nutting’s unique perspective and writing style. Tampa, in particular, does a good job of getting into the head of Celeste and making you really understand someone you wouldn’t necessarily want to be in the head of.
One night while I was reading, my boyfriend decided to read over my shoulder. And yes, it happened to be a sex scene between the teacher and her student. It was a little awkward having to explain why this was the book I had chosen to read, but I make no apologies. I like books that are different, that shed a new perspective and really put me in the head of another person –and this is one of those books. And fear not, it won’t turn you into a pedophile. So read it. It is time well spent.
