ILLICIT LEARNING CURVES
Keith Warren
When a teenager's fantasy collides with mid-life lust
Michael Chadwick, PhD., an early middle-aged English teacher with a mortgage, a pudding of a wife and itching hell-fire in his loins has another twenty years to do before he gets his pension. Grieving over the lingering death of his father and yearning for a girl he meets briefly in Provence, he is pump-primed for a splendid, shocking, mid-life crisis. His green-eyed and alluring pupil Ellie Fortune comes to him for advice. She fears she is going to be sexually assaulted by her step-father. She is proved right. While awaiting the resulting trial and despite their fears of censure, Mike and Ellie embark on an affair of love, lust and infectious laughter.
Once the trial is over they elope and marry. On the timeless, penumbral strip of a beach they seem to live beyond the normal rules of time and place. It is a romantic idyll - for a while.
Within their taboo relationship is a story for our dysfunctional, amoral times. But beyond the abrogation of duty and trust, beyond the religious hypocrisy, the sexual violence and abuse and beyond broken homes and the shocking sexualisation of children, there is always the hope of the redemptive power of love.
The novel raises challenging issues in forthright language and contains some sexually explicit episodes. It is not for the prim and faint-hearted!
