She focuses on pupils in her own classes, whom she first approaches after class. If she cannot have a boy, she masturbates.

Celeste strives for complete sexual relationships including penetration.Tampa makes the most of its theme, driving Celeste to ever more precarious escapades. Her sexual drive toward young adolescents is complete and hard-core. Her predatory, rational acting comes natural to her. Celeste's mind is like a parallel universe. The novel is written from her perspective, so the reader follows her ridiculous reasoning in line. Aged 26, she works as a high school teacher. Pedophilia is grotesk of itself, and Alissa Nutting uses hyperbole to magnify the problem: the disproportionate, excessive weirdness of Celeste Price is almost humoristic.Celeste Price is married to the over-averagely handsome Ford.

Celeste is a female, predatory pedophile.Sadly, repeated sex scandals over the past three decades have numbed readers, and although sexual assault on children by pedophiles still evokes horror, Tampa, by Alissa Nutting is much more a parody than a shocking novel.The inversion, of making the pedophile in Tampa a female character highlights the groteskness of the idea. Thus, Celeste describes her husband, and thus, right from the start she makes clear what she wants.

thirty-one is roughly seventeen years past my window of sexual interest.' (p.1). With crackling, rampantly unadulterated prose, Tampa is a grand, uncompromising, seriocomic examination of want and a scorching literary debut. She deceives everyone, and cares nothing for anyone or anything but her own pleasure. In slaking her sexual thirst, Celeste Price is remorseless and deviously free of hesitation, a monstress driven by pure motivation. Jack is enthralled and in awe of his teacher, and, most important, willing to accept Celeste's terms for a secret relationship-car rides after school rendezvous at Jack's house while his single father works late body-slamming encounters in Celeste's empty classroom between periods.Įver mindful of the danger-the perpetual risk of exposure, Jack's father's own attraction to her, and the ticking clock as Jack leaves innocent boyhood behind-the hyperbolically insatiable Celeste bypasses each hurdle with swift thinking and shameless determination, even when the solutions involve greater misdeeds than the affair itself. In mere weeks, Celeste has chosen and lured the lusciously naive Jack Patrick into her web. As the novel opens, fall semester at Jefferson Jr. Celeste pursues her craving with sociopathic meticulousness and forethought her sole purpose in becoming a teacher is to fulfill her passion and provide her access to her compulsion. She has a singular sexual obsession-fourteen-year-old boys. Her husband, Ford, is rich, square-jawed, and devoted to her.īut Celeste's devotion lies elsewhere. She drives a red Corvette with tinted windows. Celeste Price is an eighth-grade English teacher in suburban Tampa.

Tampa by Alissa Nutting