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A young novelist "turns Nabokov on his head in this tale of an Aussie Lolita who sets her sights on a witless teacher . . . enthralling and ultimately sobering" (Kirkus Reviews).
Written when Cathy Coote was nineteen, Innocents draws readers into the anatomy of an adolescent obsession. We all know that manipulating someone naïve and vulnerable into a sexual relationship to satisfy a twisted desire is wrong—even evil. 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?
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. 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. Unforgettable, disturbing, and morally complex, Innocents permanently unsettles our notions of innocence, experience, and power.
"Coote is a natural, wryly dissecting the workings of human desire." —The New York Times Book Review
“Vivid. . . . Cathy Coote is a natural, wryly dissecting the workings of human desire. She damns and absolves her characters in the space of a minute. Her touch is a ruthless finger in a wound. She will leave you wondering about the mortality of lust, love or whatever you want to call it.”—Erika Krouse, The New York Times Book Review
“Innocents is really Lolita turned upside down. . . . Coote has nothing against cranking the titillation level up to high and leaving it there. . . . What’s fascinating here, though, is how well Innocents . . . portrays adult, innocence-ending consequences. . . . Is Coote suggesting, God forbid, that the grown-up is the innocent in this lopsided pas de deux?”—Mark Rozzo, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Coote turns Nabokov on his head in this tale of an Aussie Lolita. . . . Tar-black comedy and psychosexual gamesmanship–both make for an enthralling and ultimately sobering debut”. [She] deserves acclaim not just for the narrator’s remarkably compelling voice but for so ruthlessly limning her deepening psychosis.”—Kirkus Reviews
“The rejection of sentimentality and the carefully calibrated knowingness make this more than just another Nabokov knockoff, and mark Coote as a young writer to watch.”—Publishers Weekly
“Riveting. Coote somehow manages to make dementia and derangement almost understandable, exposing the dark side of lust and the power games that accompany it. At once discomfiting and totally engrossing, Innocents is a dark form of a guilty pleasure.”—Rebecca Ascher-Walsh, Entertainment Weekly
“[A] titillating odyssey of arrant manipulation.”—Daphne Uviller, Time Out New York
“[Innocents] is open to different interpretations; one could see it as a siple indictment of the duplicitous ways of women, but it oculd equally be read as a feminist condemnation of the social construction of female sexuality and the warped identities available for women.”—Christian Perring, Metapsychology
“Written as a letter to a lover by a sixteen-year-old Catholic schoolgirl, the tale recounts the realization of female sexual power and its potency on the male of the species. . . . A clever page turner.”—Susan Taylor, Central Western Daily (Orange, New South Wales)
“Cathy Coote has delivered a novel of outstanding emotional complexity.”—Bronwyn Simpson, Manly Daily (Manly, New South Wales)
“Innocents is undeniably the work of a precocious talent . . . [building] to a powerful (and unexpectedly credible) climax.”—Chris Boyd, The Big Issue (Melbourne, Victoria)
Cathy Coote was born in 1977. She won both the Canberra Times and Sydney Morning Herald Young Writer of the Year awards in 1995. This is her first novel.