Tampa: A Novel

Tampa is the first novel by American author, Alissa Nutting. Celeste Price is a 26-year-old high-school teacher living in Tampa, Florida. Celeste is married to a cop and is a self-confessed soulless pervert. Her secret perversion is an obsession with fourteen-year-old boys. As an eighth grade English teacher, she has a large arena to choose from, and in her first class at Jefferson Junior High, she chooses Jack Patrick. She manages to juggle her job, her husband and her teenage lover until a complication arises: her lover’s father is also attracted to her. Celeste proves to be stunningly selfish, a sexual predator who is all about self-preservation and whose actions will often leave the reader gasping. This is an interesting look at child sexual abuse from the point of view of the offender. Nutting is not afraid to throw herself into this taboo subject, and approaches it with humour, panache and insight. It is perhaps a little slow to get moving, but the pace certainly picks up and manages to hold the reader’s interest where the Fifty Shades trilogy just dragged. Some editions of this erotic offering have a delightfully suggestive pink buttonhole cover. While the subject matter and the hot sex scenes may classify this as erotica, readers will find this a novel with a decent plot and some excellent imagery: “She gave the long grunt of a walrus bearing a load of breech pups..” and “The charcoal frizz of her perm hovered above her scalp like a rising cloud of smog” and “…deciding between the two of them was like being asked to pick a dance partner and given the option of a trained choreographer or an epileptic with a wooden leg” are but a few examples of this. Can a novel be both hilarious AND thought-provoking? As long as the reader is prepared for the scorching sexual content, this one is blackly funny but also sharply prescient!