The Abstinence Teacher

I enjoyed reading The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta. However, it was nowhere near as good as Little Children, which was darker and somehow drew me into the characters in a deeper way. In The Abstinence Teacher the characters are kind of broad and there is something farcical about it as a whole. That said, the story was good; funny and smart and well written. It tells the story of a suburban town in the Northeast which is beginning to be infiltrated by Christian fundamentalists. It centers on two characters, a sex ed teacher who is being forced to teach an abstinence curriculum, and a relatively new member of the church who is a former druggie and whose commitment to Christ is rather shaky. In spite of the weakness of the novel, I had a hard time putting it down and was kind of disappointed when it ended. The ending, by the way, was rather sudden. When you read on a Kindle you have much less of a sense of how much is left of a book, and in this case I had no idea I was reading the last chapter.