There’s not much comfort offered in reading this novel. It’s a clear articulation of a teacher’s sexual exploitation of a middle school boy. The encounters are described in pretty stark terms, so there’s not a lot of room for interpretation or nuance. Oh, but it’s written as a sexually liberating affair novel. So there’s that. The obvious parallels for this novel are Notes on a Scandal in which a teacher sort of “finds” herself involved in a sexual relationship with boy at her school and […]
Not for the faint of heart. (Understatement.)
Emotionally, my impulse is to give this novel three or three and a half stars, but it was so well written and interesting to think about on a more intellectual level that I just have to up it to four stars. Tampa is definitely not a book for the faint of heart, nor is it for literature Puritans who insist on sanitizing away the nastier bits of human existence from the written word, as if that will make them stop existing. Nor is it for […]