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| The Abstinence Teacher | 
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (based on 108 reviews)
Sales Rank: 547676
Category: Book
Author: Tom Perrotta
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Studio: St. Martin's Press
Manufacturer: St. Martin's Press
Label: St. Martin's Press
Format: Bargain Price
Language: English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.8 x 1.3
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
ASIN: B001CJVY7Q
Publication Date: October 16, 2007
Release Date: October 16, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 103 more reviews...
 Forgetttable November 25, 2008
Poorly developed characters - I can honestly say that I have no idea whatsoever WHY Ruth was so "attracted" to Tim.
None.
Zippo.
Well, except maybe because he has "big hands"???
Predictable - so predictable
Ends very abruptly
So forgettable, I had to re-read a few pages each time I picked up the book, so I could remember what had transpired.
As reviewed in the description,
"...He's the Steinbeck of suburbia."--Time ???
Hating to sound so brusque; I don't think so. The author doesn't even come close to the prose and depth of Steinbeck.
Apples and oranges.
I usually share books with friends, but this one will just be donated to a library.
 Quite a boring read November 25, 2008
The book is ok..but just ok. It is quite a slow and boring read. It is, however a good basis of a book group conversation!
 From the frontlines of the culture wars November 1, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
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 that evangelical Christian teens who believe in sexual abstinence before marriage actually tend to have sex earlier than other groups and have far higher rates of pregnancy and STDs. In other words, abstinence doesn't work.
Back to the novel. Perotta has a fine eye for the lives and fears of middle-class, middle-aged suburbanites with their divorces, difficult teens and professional frustrations. He also creates a counterpoint to Ruth in former rock musician and druggee Tim Mason, now reborn as a youth soccer coach who found Jesus and joined an evangelical church with a truly scary preacher. Poor Tim even gets himself maneuvered into a "Christian" marriage with a younger woman he doesn't love. When Tim leads his girls soccer team which includes Ruth's daughter in an impromptu prayer after a game, the central conflict of the novel is set.
Perotta tries to be sympathetic to all his characters -- but to me this was a flaw rather than a strength of this book. To my mind, the conflict he describes is not between two equally admirable but conflicting points of view. No, we're talking here about a battle between tolerance and intolerance and between fact-based education versus superstition mixed with ignorance.
Still, I found this novel absorbing and entertaining. Few of our novelists are as much in touch with the pulse of the nation as Perotta. My biggest quibble concerns the end of the book which was frankly disappointing. The book ends not with a bang but a whimper. Why did he whiff the climax? Having set up all the conflicts and tensions, he leaves us hanging without bringing everything to the big explosion that he'd been building for the past 300 pages. What happened? Was it a loss of nerve or an artistic miscalculation? It's a great pity. This is a very good book -- it could have been great.
Rather a disappointment October 21, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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 satirical. These characters could be plucked out and successfully inserted into any story, and that makes them powerful enough to leap up off of the page and become more real than paper and ink can render them. No wonder both the film adaptations of "Election" and "Little Children" were so beautifully, brilliantly and successfully done. Little needed to be altered to make those characters come to life.
That is not the case in his latest book, "The Abstinence Teacher." From the first page to the last, I still did not have a complete grasp of his characters. I didn't understand their motivations or their choices. I don't feel that Perrotta succeeded in conveying them to the reader, and instead of the fully living breathing manifestations I'm accustomed to with his work, I instead got the kind of pale sketches I would normally attribute to lesser writers. Because of these omissions, Perrotta does not earn the open ending this book contains, in which nothing is resolved or completed. He always leaves several major plot threads dangling, but in previous books he earned this right because he was so thorough in setting up the ending that your imagination could easily finish the story without further help from him.
The worst thing about the open ending here combined with lack of character development is that I didn't CARE about the fact that nothing was resolved. I never got close enough to any of the characters to go beyond rudimentary involvement, such as rooting for the drug addict to stay clean or for the sex ed teacher to stay true to her principals. Unfortunately, I think Perrotta was too eager to make a statement about the vocal minority that comprises the religious right and their ability to swiftly, perniciously take control of the majority to really put much effort into constructing his characters. As others have noted, some of his characters are downright stereotypical, as if he was too lazy to even depart from the normal conventions of gay men, self-righteously puritanical women, and evangelical preachers. Sadly, what little depth of character he has managed to achieve makes the people pictured here weak and vacillating -- people it's hard to really empathize with since they show no strength of character. How can they? Perrotta hasn't given them any.
Overall I wouldn't recommend skipping this book for fans of Perrotta, but I would suggest that anyone who hasn't read his books start with one of the others, and save this one for later on so that they don't get a skewed view of his writing, since this is clearly not his best effort to date. Maybe next time he'll prioritize basic character development over being topical or current and making "statements."
Chicklit as written by a man October 15, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
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