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| View Larger Image | The Abstinence Teacher
by Tom Perrotta
| | List Price: | $24.95 |  | | 6 New starting at: | $12.83 | | 9 Used starting at: | $11.36 | | | | | Sales Rank: | 299749 | | Studio: | St. Martin's Press | | | Binding: | Hardcover | | Number Of Pages: | 368 | | Publication Date: | October 16, 2007 | | Publisher: | St. Martin's Press |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Stonewood Heights is the perfect place to raise kids. It’s got the proverbial good schools, solid values and a healthy real estate market. It’s the kind of place where parents are involved in their children’s lives, where no opportunity for enrichment goes unexplored.
Ruth Ramsey is the human sexuality teacher at the local high school. She believes that “pleasure is good, shame is bad, and knowledge is power.” Ruth’s younger 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 belongs to The Tabernacle, an evangelical Christian church that doesn’t approve of Ruth’s style of teaching. And Ruth in turn doesn’t applaud The Tabernacle’s mission to take its message outside its doors. Adversaries in a small-town culture war, Ruth and Tim instinctively mistrust each other. But when a controversy on the soccer field pushes the two of them to actually talk to each other, they are forced to take each other at something other than face value.
The Abstinence Teacher exposes the powerful emotions that run beneath the surface of modern American family life and explores the complex spiritual and sexual lives of ordinary people. Elegantly written, it is characterized by the distinctive mix of satire and compassion that have animated Perrotta’s previous novels. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 3.0 based on 104 reviews)
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Chicklit as written by a man 
What a simplistic, cliched, lousy book. I expected something subtle, intriguing and tense, with rounded characters and compelling prose (a reviewer did compare the author to Steinbeck, for god's sake). For readers with, perhaps, simpler taste. For me, a waste of time and money.
October 15, 2008 | |
Promising effort not fully realized 
I heard Perrotta read a chapter from this book on the radio and really enjoyed the excerpt. But, I found that the book didn't quite live up to my expectations. There are lots of threads going on in this book but I don't feel that many of them are followed to a satisfactory conclusion. Perrotta takes on religion, sex education, gay marriage, substance abuse recovery, marriage, parenting, and more, but I don't feel that I got a real sense of resolution on any of the issues. There were some laugh out loud moments, but not enough for me to recommend this to friends. I'll donate my copy to the library.
October 06, 2008 | |
Not a Good Novel
I picked up this book with anticipation. Having seen and really appreciated the film version of the author's novel _Little Children_, I expected a complex drama with interesting characters and lots of surprises.
Most of the book wasn't . . . bad. One thing that really stood out to me was how mundane many of the situations were. It felt like the author was just trying to pad word counts--including routine transaction dialog as one main character picked up his Saturn at the oil change place, for example. The "Christians" in the book were strawmen, caricatures. I have enough familiarity with evangelical culture to know that the characters in this book that are on the Christian side of the fence are exaggerated. The author makes them obnoxious and small-minded enough that they are not sympathetic at all.
Perhaps the payoff here is that the two main characters represent both sides of an intractable moral debate; each side is explained and humanized. In the end, however, one party turns out to be far more responsible and likable than the other, giving a sense that the author is using his biases to direct and manipulate the reader.
Also, I found the ending to be anticlimactic and depressing.
September 27, 2008 | |
Fails to bridge the cultural divide
I was drawn to this story by the reviews, both on the back cover and on Amazon. I was led to believe that the author portrays two people on opposite sides of America's culture wars in an impartial way. It is a difficult feat for an author to get into the skin of people with radically different viewpoints. Unfortunately Tom Perotta does not succeed in this quest. He fully imagines the political and religious attitudes of one character, but misses on the other. I suspect that the author himself falls distinctly to one side of the cultural divide. He makes a valiant effort, but he does not reach across that divide with impartiality. As a result, almost half of the characters in the story are offensive, pitiful, or both. The old writer's rule is still true: write what you know. This author did some research, according to his notes, but he could not or would not flesh out some of his people. That left me dissatisfied.
The writer does a good job creating sympathetic and believable persons out of the two main characters. He sets up an amusing and entertaining plot. There is real potential for hilarity and truth telling, but alas, the narrative does not rise to that level. Although a relationship between the two was an outlandish conceit, I was looking forward to their interaction. When they do finally interact, the result was an anticlimax. Some reviewers suggest that the story ended too soon, without exploring the fascinating possibilities of this relationship. That is true, but I was ready to move on to another author.
September 26, 2008 | |
If you want to think... 
Many other reviewers have described the plot of this book better than I ever could. However, I can share with you my impressions. The "Abstinence Teacher" is a complex, nuanced book that avoids platitudes. The characters don't wear white and black hats --- everyone sports gray chapeaux. You'll bring your own prejudices along for the read, and you're likely to take away that which matches your own inclinations. An excellent, thought-provoking book.
September 18, 2008 | |
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