: She identifies Jack Patrick, a "naive" and "quiet" student, as her primary target, carefully selecting him for his disengaged parents and modest nature.
Tampa in August is a sauna lined with strip malls. The air is so thick with humidity you could chew it like taffy, and the only thing more relentless than the sun is the soft, rotting smell of the bay at low tide. This is where I sell dreams. Or rather, where I sell the illusion that a three-bedroom, two-bath with hurricane shutters and a lanai can outrun the inevitable.
“People float here all the time,” I say, smiling. My teeth feel like Chiclets glued to a gumline. “It’s the buoyancy of denial.” tampa alissa nutting sample
The story utilizes a first-person narrative to provide a disturbing look into the mind of a protagonist who lacks empathy or remorse.
The book explores the veneer of suburban perfection and the failures of authority figures and communities to recognize harm occurring in their midst. : She identifies Jack Patrick, a "naive" and
Critics have frequently compared the work to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita , noting its attempt to subvert that classic's perspective.
It examines the manipulation of power within institutional settings and the psychological dynamics of exploitation. This is where I sell dreams
I drive back over the Howard Frankland Bridge, the bay below me the color of a dirty aquarium. I roll down the window and let the wind eat my hair. Another soul tucked into a stucco coffin. Another commission check for a woman who teaches tenth-grade English and thinks about her students’ fathers during third period.
She doesn’t laugh. They never laugh. That’s the secret of Tampa real estate: no one is buying a home. They are buying a vault to store their grief. A garage to park the memory of the affair they had in 1987. A walk-in closet to hide the bankruptcy papers. I unlock the sliding glass door, and the air inside is the smell of last year’s pork roast and a rug that’s seen a thousand bare feet.
I think of my own apartment in Ybor City, where the cockroaches wear tiny suits of armor and the upstairs neighbor practices the tuba at 3 AM. “Ma’am,” I say, pulling a Ziploc bag of Goldfish crackers from my purse, “in Florida, the house isn’t the thing that’s haunted. You are the thing that haunts the house.”
Alissa Nutting has stated that the novel was intended to be an "un-sexy" and harrowing look at a predator, aiming to remove the "sensationalist" or "glamorous" tone often found in news coverage of similar real-life cases.
