Previous installments of my monthly(ish) newsletters for paid subscribers have featured literary letters of introduction to Farah Jasmine Griffin’s Read Until You Understand, Stephanie McCarter’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Jennine Capó Crucet’s My Time Among the Whites. I’ve got pieces lined up about Alisson Wood’s Being Lolita and Fugitive Pedagogy, by Jarvis R. Givens. You won’t want to miss those.
But it’s July! Nobody wants to read a book with “pedagogy” in the title this month. We’re all sprawling on beach towels or poolside deck chairs or wishing we were.
So I decided to go lighter with our next literary selection, and I pulled down from my bookshelf Tom Perrotta’s The Abstinence Teacher. It’s got romance! Humor! And, because this is still Anger & Clarity, teachers being denounced at school board meetings!
The novel, published in 2007, is about a sex ed teacher at a suburban high school who gets herself in trouble with local Christian Nationalists (not Perrotta’s term) when a student asks her why in the world anyone would engage in oral sex.
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