If you are brave enough to read Tampa and then braver still to finish Tampa, you are going to have a reaction. And it's going to be strong. Because this novel does not flinch or sugarcoat a thing.

What you get with Tampa is an uncompromising and eye-opening expose on a subject matter that—at least in the United States—is only hushed about because it's a taboo within a taboo: the world of female sex offenders. I'm fully aware most readers will steer clear of this novel because of the innate aversion to the subject matter. It's entirely with merit. It's an emotionally-heavy topic that can be triggering.

But if you're able to get beyond the shock value of the subject matter, you'll find Tampa is an exploration of power, privilege, and the hypocrisy of gendered double standards in the treatment of sexual predation. Celeste is beautiful, affluent, and self-aware. She leverages her outward perfection to conceal the monster she is inside: she's a predator. The worst kind at that. A pedophile. Well, an ephebophile to be more accurate. But that's not to try and lessen the severity or depravity of her behavior.

The novel follows Celeste on her quest to charm, groom, and ultimately seduce a 14-year-old boy under her tutelage. From the opening lines of the novel, it was very clear to me that there wasn't going to be anything sanitized about this story. It refuses to comfort and instead challenges us with the ugliest aspects of human behavior and societal hypocrisy. Nutting’s decision to tell this story with unflinching honesty, rather than through the lens of redemption or moral justice, is what makes the novel both important and controversial. It asks difficult questions about how we define predators and victims, how gender influences those definitions, and whether society is willing to confront the answers we arrive at.

Celeste’s voice is disarmingly candid, often veering into grotesque detail as she describes her fantasies and manipulations. Her lack of remorse or self-awareness heighten the intentional discomfort that's woven throughout the narrative, making you confront the reality of her behavior. The prose is unapologetically explicit, both in its graphic descriptions of Celeste’s thoughts and her calculated manipulation of those around her. The fact that Celeste evades suspicion largely because she doesn't fit the stereotype of a predator is a damning social critique on how we choose to see sexual abuse, especially when women are the ones engaging in it. Celeste’s predation is made possible because the world equates beauty with virtue, making her nearly untouchable. Nutting exposes this complicity with biting and scathing satire.

I appreciated that the novel refused to moralize or soften its protagonist. There's no redemption or any excuses given for Celeste’s actions. Instead, Celeste is simply shown as she is: a complex, repellent figure—a predator whose privilege, beauty, and cunning allow her to exploit a system that's still behind on recognizing and addressing women as sexual offenders. The deliberate lack of condemnation exposes our biases: would society react differently if Celeste were male? Nutting masterfully uses this gender reversal to expose cultural double standards, where male perpetrators are vilified while female ones are often fetishized or dismissed. Too many times in my life I've heard the quip Man, I wish they had teachers like that back when I was in school or I would've loved to have had a teacher do that to me. Society doesn't take female predation seriously enough. And in that regard, it disarms the validation and voices of male victims. Our concept of male sexuality—even among our boys and young men—is such that it's more of a rite of passage into manhood than it is an opportunity for their exploitation and victimization.

Tampa isn't the easiest novel to get through because of its subject matter. But after reading it, I was glad I was exposed to it. Because it's subject matter is important to me. And it's important for society to understand and confront. Boys are incredibly vulnerable at the age of the victims in this novel, straddling the biological fence somewhere in the transitory phase between prepubescence and adulthood. And their emotions, experiences, and traumas hold just as much worth and value to be heard. We owe it to our boys to listen.

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Created Jan 31, 2025 at 3:10am • Submit your own review...