Tampa

Celeste Price is a beautiful, married eighth-grade teacher in Tampa, Florida, who is sexually obsessed with fourteen-year-old boys. She arranges to get a job at a school, selects a boy, Jack Patrick, and starts a relationship with him while hiding it from her husband and colleagues. Told in Celeste's own cold voice, the novel shows her calculating nature and lack of remorse, with satirical elements about desire and media obsession with beautiful offenders. The subject is disturbing and the scenes are explicit.

Intended for adult readers who can tolerate very dark, transgressive material in contemporary fiction. It will interest those who study unreliable narrators and the satire of beauty and power, but is not for everyone.

Inward-looking and open-ended; a moderate read.

Best for readers like The Empathetic Explorer. Which reader are you?