Five novels with incredible child caregivers

Kiley Reid’s new novel is Such a Fun Age.

At LitHub she tagged five novels with incredible child caregivers, including:

Alissa Nutting, Tampa

Twenty-six-year-old Celeste Price is a wife, a teacher, a knockout, and pedophile. Everything she does is a careful transaction. She volunteers herself for an annoyingly far-away classroom, as it will be the least likely to be snooped upon. She marries a fumbling cop who supports her financially and only requires inconsistent yet highly performative sex in return. And she allows a 14-year-old boy one picture of her on his phone, in exchange for their constant and secret sexual encounters. Nutting doesn’t shy away from Celeste’s obsession with the carnal. Celeste’s attraction to sexual abuse, and her preferred lack of emotional connection during these abusive actions, doesn’t detract from her own emotional depth as a character. Nutting depicts a charming predator in a controlled and somehow hilarious tone. There is a haunting paragraph dedicated to the way Celeste likes to eat French fries that I think of far too often.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Tampa is among Amelia Gray's top ten dark books, Tiffany Gibert's ten erotic books hotter and better than Fifty Shades of Grey and Kristi Steffen's top five titles told from the perspective of an extremely disturbed individual you would never want to meet.

--Marshal Zeringue