The Abstinence Teacher

Editorial Review:

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:

Avg. Customer Rating: 3.0 / 5.0

From the frontlines of the culture wars:

Tom Perotta does have a knack of getting in front of the latest political wave with his novels. This one takes an entertaining look at the cultural wars. Ruth Ramsey, the health teacher in a suburban school, suddenly finds herself accosted by the religious right and their insistence on teaching education based on sexual abstinence.
As luck would have it, I read this book just after reading a fascinating article in the New Yorker on this very subject. When it comes to the actual figures, it turns out... more info

Rather a disappointment:

In my readings of Tom Perrotta's previous novels Election and Little Children: A Novel, I was particularly struck by his gift for sparsity of language. In just a few short sentences about a character, he can make you feel as if you instantly have known the person intimately for years. He burrows directly into the center of their hearts and minds almost effortlessly, and the construction of these characters seems like the primary objective of the book, superseding any predispositions to be topical or... more info

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.

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... more info

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