Friday, October 26, 2007

And our November book is....The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta

Well Ladies and Gent,
Start your book buying/borrowing frenzy, because we are going to be reading The Abstinence Teacher during the month of November. For all of you little sex-kittens who were requesting filthy novels, you may be just in luck. I just read Michiku Kakutani's review (from the NY Times) and apparently this author is the same guy who wrote "Little Children" (which if you haven't seen that movie, see it, its good and insane)

So, official start date is November 1st. Any comments or questions you want to bring up to the group can be posted on the side bar (see the right side of the page) for easy viewing. Yay! I am copying the summary and the NY Times review below, so you can get a little preview:)

Happy reading!!

Barnes&Noble Summary
Midway through Tom Perrotta's sixth novel, The Abstinence Teacher, Ruth Ramsey, a divorced mother of two, reluctantly puts on lipstick and jeans to meet with Tim Mason, her youngest daughter's soccer coach and a recently remarried father of one, and even more reluctantly admits to herself that she secretly wishes she were a heroine in one of those "corny 'opposites attract' narratives" that were so appealing to writers of sitcoms and romantic comedies:
The formula was simple: you brought together a man and a woman who held wildly divergent world views -- an idealistic doctor, say, and an ambulance-chasing lawyer -- and waited for them to realize that their witty intellectual combat was nothing more than a smoke screen, kicked up to conceal the inconvenient and increasingly obvious fact that they were desperate to hop into bed together.


The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani
As formulaic as this plot might sound, Mr. Perrotta uses it not to construct a conventional screwball romance but to create a sad-funny-touching story that looks at the frustrations and perils of life in suburbia through darkly tinted, not rose-colored glasses—a story similar in tone and setting to his last novel, Little Children (2004).

1 comment:

stephanie said...

I'm buying it on Amazon right now!