Take Lolita, make Humbert Humbert a female middle-school teacher and Lolita her male student, and you have this book. No, wait. Take Lolita, make Humbert Humbert a female middle-school teacher and Lolita her male student, then strip it of all Nabokov’s artistry and profound understanding, remove the hesitant yet enduring empathies it invokes, replace all of that with ten-thousand iterations of the word “moist” and you have this book. An awful attempt at being shocking, it’s really just gross and unpleasant. I suspect Nutting is trying to challenge the reader by titillating her with florid, tawdry prose about sex with teenagers, but it’s just a cheap trick, and an ineffective one, for all that. Art can and should challenge us; it can be pornographic, it can be obscene, it can be disgusting. But if it is those things, and this book is, please god, let it also be good. Tampa can make no such claims.
Rather than waste the few hours it will take to force this garbage down, you might try one of these instead:
Lolita—Vladimir Nabokov (for obvious reasons)
Notes on a Scandal: What Was She Thinking?: A Novel—Zoe Heller (similar vein, superior in every respect)
Tiger, Tiger: A Memoir— Margaux Fragoso (a truly insightful work)