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The Abstinence Teacher | 
 enlarge | Author: Tom Perrotta
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $8.77
You Save: $16.18 (65%)
New (7) Used (12) from $4.48
Rating:  113 reviews
Sales Rank: 726773
Format: Bargain Price
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
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 108 more reviews...
 Pointless......amusing in places....but pointless December 31, 2008
I made a concerted effort to read this book with an open mind and not let my opinions of the beliefs and views of the characters influence my enjoyment of the book. While there were some enjoyable and amusing parts (my favorite characters in the whole book were Randall and Gregory) I kept waiting for the point to sneak up on you. It never did.
 two dimensional characters December 17, 2008
straight to the point: this book was a disappointment.
i actually enjoy reading mainstream books that talk about christians. there's an almost voyeuristic fascination with finding out how we'll be portrayed. i'm often quite pleased with the depiction. a great example of this from my fairly recent reading was the young adult fiction book "evolution, me, and other freaks of nature", which (like this book) takes place in a public high school and revolves (at least partially) around a conservative church's efforts to pressure the school into their belief set. but, in freaks of nature, there were at least some of the christian characters who were portrayed in three dimmensions. another was "the year of living biblically", which -- i thought -- was very generous and gracious, even while having some fun with the extremist tendencies of some christians.
the abstinence teacher centers on the story of a liberal sex ed teacher who is forced to teach an abstinence curriculum she abhors, as a result of the pressure of a fundamentalist church lobbying the school board. a second key character is a reformed druggie who is a recent convert to this church, and the soccer coach of the central character's daughter.
problem is: the christians in the story are seriously two-dimensional. every single one of them is an idiot. well, that's not quite true: the soccer coach is a two-dimensional jerk until he starts to lose his faith -- then he becomes a fully-developed character.
i know there are idiots in christianity. i know there are churches who do the things portrayed in this book. but the book lacked because the author wasn't willing to make any of the christians with a mix of good motives and bad behavior.
bummer. could have been such a better book with a bit more complexity.
Good start December 12, 2008
Perrotta, author of ELECTION, is wonderful of capturing the idiosyncrasies and absurdity of modern suburban life. He has a talent for developing believable, realistic characters, people who could be your next door neighbors, and then putting them in such awkward situations that, although they do outlandish things, they don't seem outlandish.
In THE ABSTINENCE TEACHER, a fundamentalist Christian church has moved into town and pushed upon the local school district a curriculum of abstinence over sex education. This doesn't sit well with Ruth, who has been teaching sex education for ten years and believes that pleasure is good and shame is bad. Ruth gets into hot water for her failure to strictly follow the abstinence curriculum. At the same time, Tim, a recovered drug addict and alcoholic, girls soccer coach and member of the fundamentalist church, finds himself on the opposite side of the cultural divide but also in hot water for inviting his team to pray with him after a game.
I found most of this novel very readable and enjoyable, but ultimately unsatisfying. The characters are likable, and Perrotta does a good job of fairly portraying realistic struggles on both sides of the divide. But he sets up too many conflicts without really paying them off. The book's ending is frustratingly open-ended, never quite climaxing and resolving very little. Not that everything needs to be tightly wrapped up, but I would have loved and think this book needs another two chapters.
The Abstinence Teacher December 9, 2008
This is a truly bad book on so many levels. Flat characters, predictable plot, repetitive dialogue. Don't waste your time.
BLAH! December 3, 2008
Great premise, and I was into the book in the beginning. It started to just lose the plot and the characters were so poorly developed. The ending...I was like "are you serious? this is it??". Waste of my time. Too bad.
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