But this debauching of a decent one was more compelling than anything I had ever experienced." The girl's high-serious tone and overwrought language ("Oh how can I begin to show you the contours of my perversion? Your exploration destroyed these lands, darling"), while plausibly that of a teenager, becomes grating nonetheless, but Coote's brazen novel never falls into precocity or melodrama. "I had thought there could be no pleasure more exquisite than that of seducing a shy man.
"I held all the aces youth, beauty and cuteness." The narrator becomes increasingly calculating as she tangles him in her web of sexual manipulation. With newly awakened sexual powers, she casts a spell over her defenseless unnamed teacher. The narrator, raised competently, albeit coldly, by her aunt and uncle, maintains a wholesome facade, behind which lies a devious imagination and utterly jaded view of human relations. The story is written as a letter from the nameless, orphaned 16-year-old Catholic schoolgirl to her 34-year-old lover reviewing their affair and its consequences. Coote's debut (written when she was 19) details a twisted love affair between a teenage student and teacher from the nymphet's point of view. Was Lolita utterly cunning and Humbert Humbert the innocent seduced? In Australian writer Coote's provocative variation on a theme tackled many times before, the answer is a disturbing and (nearly) unequivocal yes. “Coote is a natural, wryly dissecting the workings of human desire.” - The New York Times Book Review Unforgettable, disturbing, and morally complex, Innocents permanently unsettles our notions of innocence, experience, and power. She leaves the aunt and uncle who are her guardians and moves in with her teacher together, they quickly embark on a journey into their darkest desires. When the nameless young narrator of Innocents decides to seduce her teacher, she immediately realizes that the power of her sexuality is greater than she ever imagined. But when the perpetrator is a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, is she culpable? And if the victim is her thirty-four-year-old teacher, shouldn’t he have known better? We all know that manipulating someone naïve and vulnerable into a sexual relationship to satisfy a twisted desire is wrong-even evil.
Written when Cathy Coote was nineteen, Innocents draws readers into the anatomy of an adolescent obsession. enthralling and ultimately sobering” ( Kirkus Reviews). A young novelist “turns Nabokov on his head in this tale of an Aussie Lolita who sets her sights on a witless teacher . . .
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