The Abstinence Teacher » (Bargain)

Hailed as "one of America's best-kept literary secrets" by Newsweek magazine, Tom Perrotta is a talented novelist and short story writer whose bitingly satirical works, such as Election and Little Children, lay bare the suburban experience.

The rich new novel by the bestselling author of Little Children, Joe College, and Election

The Barnes & Noble Review

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.