Teach Me

This review feels a little more personal than usual because I had a few similar experiences to the main character. I'm not sure what to warn for. "Teach Me" is a book where an adult man waits for a student to turn eighteen before they engage sexually, but it's an enormous power dynamic. So, dub-con. The one-sentence summary is basically the whole book.
I read this book over and over when I was sixteen. It was an enormous plate glass window into my mind and life at the time. I had a huge crush on my comp/lit teacher the year prior, the whole year. My teacher, like Nine's, read love poetry to me when we were alone. My teacher, like Nine's, married someone else due to pregnancy. Like Nine, I engaged in obsessive behavior and observed show more strange and little things about everyone around me. I never engaged in the stalking she does almost immediately after meeting her teacher, though. But this book made me cry and cry back then. I was really proud of the day that my heartbreak due to unrequited love faded. And I never wanted to read this book again. That was half my life ago. For the past two days, I have no idea why, but I wanted to reread it. I did, as an e-book.

Now would be the time to point out that I've grown and changed so much as a person since my teen years. I have. Now I point out how many women I've dated since having the crush: seven, over a period of fifteen years. None lasted longer than a few months, due to a variety of factors. I expected to whip through this book without emotion, and try to figure out at some point why I wanted to read a book with a power dynamic I can't stand. When I was totally eighteen, of course, I started writing teacher-student romance and cried a lot. My comp/lit teacher and I were still emailing back and forth on our personal emails. I tried awkwardly to flirt and just made my teacher uncomfortable. Our personal emails started a month into the school year because I wanted help with a novel I was writing. We were spending enough time together after school that my mom figured -something- out. Nothing physical happened. We switched to only email and my teacher wrote me a long, sweet email as I bawled in text-form about a recent breakup.

This book brought that up now, for a flicker of a moment. I'm not sanctimonious because nothing physical happened, only reading love poems aloud. I just forgot this book is about a teen who wants desperately to bang her teacher like a cheap drum and convinces herself she's being discreet. She's not. I wasn't, either. People knew, but again, nothing physical. The chapters are super short and quite plentiful for such a relatively long novel. I find this annoying, now. The chapter names are meaningless, stupid, and unnecessary. And yet, I get why certain teens love this so much. Nine and Mr Mann are both outrageously inappropriate with one another and don't care about getting caught, and hello, insta-lust on Nine's part and predatory behavior on Mr Mann's. Every word from him is a lie and he's creepy. Nine is just super-horny and for a budding astrophysicist, entirely ruled by her emotions. So, a teenager.

When I read the book the second and third time at age sixteen, I cheered Nine for crashing the wedding. The other times I read it, I was so sad for her, and me. Now, I just admire it as a creative way to start the novel. Halfway through the book, Nine's teacher doesn't want to have sex with her anymore. She spends pages upon pages exhibiting increasingly terrible behavior, and the story is accordingly unrealistic: she should have been arrested so, so many times. It's a small town, to boot! She turns into a parody of a 'Fatal Attraction' stereotype, and I usually adore the 'Fatal Attraction' trope. Not here. At all. She tries to dub-con Schuyler and is just a gross person. When Schuyler is hospitalized following a car accident, Nine worries about him for five minutes before jawing with Mr Mann about their relationship. Of course, Schuyler's fine. I was glad, since he's the most interesting and realistic character. I wanted Nine to face some kind of consequence, but she never does.

Nelson gets inside the mindset of a certain type of teen girl really well, I give him that. And this book helped me process a lot of emotion when I needed it. This came out right around the time my comp/lit teacher left, and this helped me cope at the time. show less

My Summary: Carolina ("Nine") is the type of girl you love to hate: practically a genius, she doesn't even try when it comes to grades and doing well in school. Always a bit of a loner, Nine finds herself drawn to the mysterious, unconventional English teacher(Mr. Mann), who gets her to challenge her own opinion of poetry and history.

Nine thinks this little crush is one-sided until the day she finds herself in the passenger seat of his car while he confesses his feelings for her. Soon the two are caught up in a secretive romance, always looking over their shoulders in case they are found out. But things can only end badly, as Nine discovers when Mr. Mann mysteriously breaks it off...

My Thoughts: Despite the controversial subject, I show more really enjoyed this book. Nine is such a quirky character that you can't help but feel for her during those tough moments, and even when she seems to go a little bit... well, crazy, you kind of wince a little but still hope that she gets a happy ending (or maybe that's just me - I'm a sucker for happy endings).

The other characters were great as well. I adored Nine's best friend (the poor guy had to go through so much!), and I really liked Mr. Mann as well, even if he is made out to be the 'bad guy'. You understood why he did what he did, and you couldn't help but feel bad for him after everything Nine did.

The writing was awesome. Pure awesomeness with extra awesome on top (does that make sense? I don't think so). R. A. Nelson has a really unique writing style that I really liked, and Nine's point of view is hilarious.

Final Thoughts: I recommend this for anyone who's curious about how exactly something like this could happen. It's a great contemporary lit book, but probably not for anyone under 16. show less

Hallucinatory, intense, almost otherworldly. I had inappropriate relationships with teachers, sure, but nothing at all like Nine's. But oh, how brilliantly Nelson captures those feelings. I'm reeling a little, from reading and revisiting all at the same time.

Nine's a bright girl, too smart to fall in love with a teacher, right? But she does, and everything shifts in her world. The voice is pitch-perfect, and I inhabited Nine from about the thirtieth page. I'm shaking my head, trying to remember I'm almost 50, and my high school Government class is far, far behind me.

Recommended, especially if you've ever found yourself in love with precisely the wrong person- or precisely the right person at the wrong time.

I’ve read so many novels about student/teacher relationships, so I was a little skeptical about this one, but I just after the first chapter, I knew it was going to be different.

The entire story is told through Carolina‘s, or Nine as she’s nicknamed, point of view. She’s probably one of the most unique and different characters I’ve ever read. Her thoughts aren’t ever really focused on one thing. She’s what you call a scatter-brain, but it works very well. Her story is full of completely off-topic ramblings, but it only makes her character much more entertaining to read.

It was one of those stories where I got so wrapped up that I’d actually start to feel. For example, when Mr. Mann, Nine’s dreamy new poetry teacher, show more breaks up with her out of the blue, my chest literally throbbed for Nine. Another reason Nine was so different to read about- she didn’t sit down and take it. After awhile, Nine’s love and heartbreak for Mr. Mann turned into a full obsession. He hadn’t given her an excuse for breaking her heart, and she won’t stop until she gets one.

This isn’t the story of a student/teacher relationship and how it came to be. This is a story about the aftermath of such. Though I felt some negativity towards both of the main characters, Nine and Mr. Mann, the book left me in a content with them, and their relationship.

It’s not recent, and you’d probably have to do some online shopping or library browsing for it- but I definitely recommend it. I can guarantee you that it’s the most diverse student/teacher story you’ll ever read about, and it’ll probably become your favorite as well! show less

Love, obsession, and revenge all come together in this dizzying and sensuous tale. In her senior year of high school, Carolina “Nine” Livingston falls hard for her new English teacher, the beautiful, poetry-loving Mr. Mann, who quotes Emily Dickinson all the time. Mr. Mann makes Nine feel things she didn’t even know she could feel, and she believes that the two of them will one day live together, marry, and go on their dream honeymoon.

Then a sudden announcement from Mr. Mann changes everything. Nine is left floundering in a world that’s suddenly too big and too small at the same time. Her emotions spiral out of control and she can hardly control them, eventually endangering the lives of Mr. Mann, her best friend, and even show more herself. When will she learn to stop just doing and to start thinking?

TEACH ME is poetic and scary and reminds me a lot of Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak. The characters stayed with me long after I had put down the book. Everything in Nine’s world feels eerily real; you will feel like screaming at her for her actions while at the same time feeling her hurt. The author has done a beautiful, near-perfect job of portraying a devastating affair between student and teacher. If you are not faint-hearted, then pick this book up. show less

As you might guess from her nickname "Nine," Carolina's much more at home in the world of numbers than words, so the last thing she ever expected was for a poetry class to change her life. But that was before Mr. Mann, the young new teacher, walked into her classroom with his Johnny Depp hair and his ice-blue eyes and his passionate readings of the works of Emily Dickinson. The prim poetess would be horrified at the way Mr. Mann uses her words to seduce his student. The ensuing clandestine affair is intense, all-consuming and unsettling (particularly when they make love in his apartment beneath a giant framed poster of Emily - ew) and Nine falls hard. She falls even harder, into a bottomless pit of crippling depression and blinding show more obsession, when love turns to betrayal after he abruptly ends the relationship without explanation. Her single-minded fixation on him veers into dangerous territory as she moves closer and closer to the edge of sanity. It's all very realistically, vividly, and brilliantly conveyed. The writing is both witty and luminous. show less

-an absolutely amazing read! I could NOT put it down. Plenty of us smart girls have been roped into relationships with unreliable guys - whether they're older like the teacher in this case - or not. This book absolutely NAILS the passion, the pain, the angst, the anger, and the aftermath. But the funny parts and the airy writing style keep it entertaining. You feel like you're in Nine's head and that the author has been inside yours. I ran a search on R.A. Nelson and found out he has another book coming out soon. Can't wait to read it.