Tampa by Alissa Nutting

Hello my lovely readers! Oh, this book and its controversy...let's get into it. 

SYNOPSIS
Celeste Price, a smoldering 26-year-old middle-school teacher in Florida, unrepentantly recounts her elaborate and sociopathically determined seduction of a 14-year-old student. Celeste has chosen and lured the charmingly modest Jack Patrick into her web. Jack is enthralled and in awe of his eighth-grade teacher, and, most importantly, willing to accept Celeste’s terms for a secret relationship—car rides after dark, rendezvous at Jack’s house while his single father works the late shift, and body-slamming erotic encounters in Celeste’s empty classroom. In slaking her sexual thirst, Celeste Price is remorseless and deviously free of hesitation, a monstress of pure motivation. She deceives everyone, is close to no one, and cares little for anything but her pleasure. Tampa is a sexually explicit, virtuosically satirical, American Psycho–esque rendering of a monstrously misplaced but undeterrable desire.

MY THOUGHTS
This book was...rough. There was so much controversy surrounding it regarding the plot, obviously. People either loved or absolutely hated this book. I fell into the category of  "meh." 

A lot of reviews complained about the gratuitous sex scenes between Celeste and Jack, the double standards about how if this book was about a male teacher and a teenage girl it would be panned, how it sounded like Celeste was written by a man etc, etc.

In my opinion, this novel wasn't well-written. Celeste had such potential to be an interesting, multi-dimensional, morally grey character. Instead, author Alissa Nutting turns her into a cartoonishly horny teacher. She was horny and mean to unimaginable levels. It just completely turned me off from what this book could've been. The novel  Adele, although not about pedophilia, tackles a woman who is a sex addict and she was written 10 times better than Celeste.

'Oh, but that's the point, Celeste is supposed to be unlikeable!' Nah. She was just a flat character. Seeing as how this novel was based on Debra Lafave, whom the author went to school with, there were all sorts of layers Celeste could have had. She could've had a predilection for teenage boys because she was molested by her father or she's mentally stuck at the age of 13 because of some trauma she endured. But to just say to her husband Ford at the end of the book "It's just what I like." Give me a break. That's such a cop out.

The plot wouldn't have bothered me if the characters were fully-fleshed out, but to have a controversial plot and then plain writing and one-dimensional characters just made this book a "meh," to me. It had potential.