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St. Martin's Press
October 2007
On Sale: October 16, 2007
368 pages ISBN: 0312358334 EAN: 9780312358334 Hardcover
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Fiction
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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