The Abstinence Teacher (Reading Group Gold)
Author(s):
Tom Perrotta
Label: St. Martin's Griffin
Publisher(s):
St. Martin's Griffin
Studio: St. Martin's Griffin
Manufacturer: St. Martin's Griffin
Binding: Paperback
List Price: $13.95
Our Price: $11.16
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Editorial Reviews
Product Description
?Perrotta is that rare combination: a satirist with heart?.Those who haven?t curled up on the couch with this writer?s books are missing a very great pleasure.??Seattle Times
Stonewood Heights is the perfect place to raise children: it?s got good schools, solid values and a healthy real estate market. Parents in the town are involved in their children?s lives, and often in other children?s lives, too?coaching sports, driving carpool, focusing on enriching experiences. Ruth Ramsey is the high school human sexuality teacher whose openness is not appreciated by all her students?or their parents. Her daughter?s soccer coach is Tim Mason, a former stoner and rocker whose response to hitting rock bottom was to reach out and be saved. Tim?s introduction of Christianity on the playing field horrifies Ruth, while his evangelical church sees a useful target in the loose-lipped sex ed teacher. But when these two adversaries in a small-town culture war actually talk to each other, a surprising friendship begins to develop.
?Nobody renders the world of soccer moms and sprinklers and SUVs like Perrotta. He?s the Steinbeck of suburbia.??Time
?Tom Perrotta is a truth-telling, unshowy chronicler of modern-day America.??The New York Times Book Review (in a front-page review)
The Abstinence Teacher illuminates the powerful emotions that run beneath the placid surface of modern American family life, and explores the complicated spiritual and sexual lives of ordinary people. It is elegantly and simply written, characterized by the distinctive mix of satire and compassion that has become Perrotta?s trademark.
Customer Reviews
Pointless......amusing in places....but pointless
I made a concerted effort to read this book with an open mind and not let my opinions of the beliefs and views of the characters influence my enjoyment of the book. While there were some enjoyable and amusing parts (my favorite characters in the whole book were Randall and Gregory) I kept waiting for the point to sneak up on you. It never did.
two dimensional characters
straight to the point: this book was a disappointment.
i actually enjoy reading mainstream books that talk about christians. there's an almost voyeuristic fascination with finding out how we'll be portrayed. i'm often quite pleased with the depiction. a great example of this from my fairly recent reading was the young adult fiction book "evolution, me, and other freaks of nature", which (like this book) takes place in a public high school and revolves (at least partially) around a conservative church's efforts to pressure the school into their belief set. but, in freaks of nature, there were at least some of the christian characters who were portrayed in three dimmensions. another was "the year of living biblically", which -- i thought -- was very generous and gracious, even while having some fun with the extremist tendencies of some christians.
the abstinence teacher centers on the story of a liberal sex ed teacher who is forced to teach an abstinence curriculum she abhors, as a result of the pressure of a fundamentalist church lobbying the school board. a second key character is a reformed druggie who is a recent convert to this church, and the soccer coach of the central character's daughter.
problem is: the christians in the story are seriously two-dimensional. every single one of them is an idiot. well, that's not quite true: the soccer coach is a two-dimensional jerk until he starts to lose his faith -- then he becomes a fully-developed character.
i know there are idiots in christianity. i know there are churches who do the things portrayed in this book. but the book lacked because the author wasn't willing to make any of the christians with a mix of good motives and bad behavior.
bummer. could have been such a better book with a bit more complexity.
Good start
Perrotta, author of ELECTION, is wonderful of capturing the idiosyncrasies and absurdity of modern suburban life. He has a talent for developing believable, realistic characters, people who could be your next door neighbors, and then putting them in such awkward situations that, although they do outlandish things, they don't seem outlandish.
In THE ABSTINENCE TEACHER, a fundamentalist Christian church has moved into town and pushed upon the local school district a curriculum of abstinence over sex education. This doesn't sit well with Ruth, who has been teaching sex education for ten years and believes that pleasure is good and shame is bad. Ruth gets into hot water for her failure to strictly follow the abstinence curriculum. At the same time, Tim, a recovered drug addict and alcoholic, girls soccer coach and member of the fundamentalist church, finds himself on the opposite side of the cultural divide but also in hot water for inviting his team to pray with him after a game.
I found most of this novel very readable and enjoyable, but ultimately unsatisfying. The characters are likable, and Perrotta does a good job of fairly portraying realistic struggles on both sides of the divide. But he sets up too many conflicts without really paying them off. The book's ending is frustratingly open-ended, never quite climaxing and resolving very little. Not that everything needs to be tightly wrapped up, but I would have loved and think this book needs another two chapters.
The Abstinence Teacher
This is a truly bad book on so many levels. Flat characters, predictable plot, repetitive dialogue. Don't waste your time.
BLAH!
Great premise, and I was into the book in the beginning. It started to just lose the plot and the characters were so poorly developed. The ending...I was like "are you serious? this is it??". Waste of my time. Too bad.
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