I get it - the vagina on the cover looks like a buttonhole - clever, that. Book cover of the year! 
 This book is based on the real-life case of Debra Lafave, who was busted in, yes, Tampa in 2005 for "Lewd or Lascivious Battery" against a 14 year old boy. She was his teacher. She was 23 at the time. 
 As you may know, this deliquescent, oozing and dripping Boylita novel is about as un-pc as you can get. Whereas Mr Nabokov's brilliant Lolita skirts around the actual sex because that was probably the very last thing our Vlad wanted to write about and also because they would have put him in prison if he had, Tampa revels in every lubricious manoeuvre, every genital twitch, pulse and torque detailed, every orifice given the attention a marine biologist devotes to the life cycle of the sea anemone. These sections are as porny as can be. Two questions then assault the reader - 
 1) is this erotic? Are you getting turned on? If so, please note you are getting turned on by descriptions of a 26 year old female teacher and a just turned 14 year old boy. You know, like, ew. But hey, you say, that's okay, because this is a fiction. You know, fantasy. It's made up. So it's okay. 
 Well, 2) how about mentally reversing the sexes, so that it's a 26 year old male teacher and a just turned 14 year old girl. Yeah, maybe then the it's-just-fantasy thing wouldn't work. I wonder why that might be? Someone should try to get a reversed-gender Tampa published and report back. So we seem to have a novel about this giant gender attitude imbalance thing here. 
 We can say with some confidence that Miss Nutting has written a deliberately provocative novel (and has got a lot of people's attention I understand). It is true that occasionally, very occasionally, you get a case where a woman sexually harasses a man at work. Out of ten gazillion cases of sexual harassment, you get one where the man is the victim. And this case gets on the news (because it's so rare) and Michael Douglas makes a movie about it . This then provides limitless joy to all the creeps who then say there you are, women are just as bad as men. Of course, they aren't - one Aileen Wuornos does not a thousand Ted Bundys equate to. One husband beater does not balance out the billion wife beaters on the planet. But the creeps like to say it does, looking for an excuse to call women and especially feminists a few names, get some of their own back, since they've been backed into a corner lately and they pine for the days where you could get away with murder. 
 When you write about these rare exceptions, it's like you're giving aid and comfort to the enemy, you're giving them this ammunition. When one feminist organised a conference about female paedophilia, other feminists turned up for the sole reason of shouting abuse at her and shutting it all down : 
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCpr3h... 
 TAMPA VS LOLITA 
 There is no comparison between Tampa and Lolita in terms of style - I know that Alissa Nutting has a breathtaking turn of phrase on occasion from reading her great collection ( Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls ) but in Tampa she's in character - Celeste Price is a chilly misanthropic paedophile - she has no friends, no relations, hates her husband and strongly dislikes her work colleagues - so her first person account of the whole debacle is in appropriately businesslike and brisk language except for the descriptions of the sex. But one thing both novels stress in exactly the same way - both Humbert and Celeste are fixated on children of a very specific age, and as soon as they grow past that age and their bodies change, there's no attraction any more, and they drop the one they have been having like a hot potato, and seek a new model. 
 I think this novel is hard to love and actually not that easy to like, either. It throws you into the moral maze which I have suggested above. The boys involved LOVE their school detentions with their hot blonde teacher, you bet they do. Even when she has to impart something disagreeable, she has a way of softening the blow: 
 (view spoiler)[ 
 "Put your hands on my breasts," I instructed. "I have to tell you something traumatic and you need to be reminded of all the good that's here in the world for you to enjoy." Wordlessly, Jack clutched his palms onto my breasts and swallowed. 
 "Your father had a heart attack." 
 (hide spoiler)] 
 But Celeste, I fear, is in the end a fictitious character by which I mean fake. Even though based on a real case, I couldn't believe in her for one moment. She's 100% obsessed with getting her rocks off with a 14 year old boy. All the time. Morning noon and night. Never exhausted when there's a 14 year old in the house. Never says no. She's like the great Mae West one-liner : "I'm feeling rather tired tonight, boys - three of you will have to go home". Celeste is, in fact, like those rather unrealistic representations of women in porn. Just because she has a deviant sexual predilection surely doesn't therefore mean she's The Beast with the Unstoppable Loins - isn't that like giving your villain a cruel moustache and penchant for squashing small animals? 
 What Celeste does have is a fabulous line in narcissism : 
 I wondered what percentage of the Jefferson Junior High students - if I came to them in the middle of the night, naked - would agree to have sex with me even if it would mean they'd die forty-eight hours later. I guessed there would be at least a small few. 
 and 
 Like a tollbooth in his memory, every partner he'd have afterward would have to pass through the gate of my comparison, and it would be a losing comparison. 
 A semi-tumescent 3.5 stars, then, and some Kleenex.