15. Taming the Beast by Emily Maguire

Sarah Clark first meets Daniel Carr when she is a 14-year-old student in Australia and he is her 38-year-old English teacher. Raised to succeed academically, Sarah outperforms all the other students and is drawn to Daniel to discuss literature no one else her age is reading. Daniel soon seduces Sarah, and she becomes addicted to him and refuses to stop seeing him. When Daniel suddenly moves his family to Brisbane for another teaching job, Sarah is convinced she will never love again. Fast forward years later, and Sarah is still searching for a man like Daniel Carr. Now self-destructive and admitting to sleeping with hundreds of men, Sarah also binge drinks and uses drugs. Her only close childhood friend, Jamie, becomes her pawn, and she embarks on a sexual relationship with him also, with disastrous results. When she finally meets Daniel Carr again in a bar, their violent sexual relationship begins again.

This is an extremely raw, violent, and explicit novel. The characters are pained and very damaged, and engage in dangerous relationships and acts. While the beginning of the book (which focuses on the school girl Sarah) is often powerful, as the novel progresses the sexual violence and degradation darkens the novel tremendously. Billed on the back cover, as a modern Lolita, I found it nothing like the great classic, although it did make me want to re-read Lolita, which is one of my favorite books. This novel is for fans of Chuck Palahniuk and the stories of Mary Gaitskill.