Tampa is child pornography. And if child porn is banned in all societies that allow adult erotica, I do not see how and why this book should have been published.

I picked up the e-book on an entirely misguided assumption that this would be the “next 50 Shades of Grey”. Honestly, I would have left off somewhere in the middle had I not been reading it for work.

The story has lots of sex — regular, kinky, crazed, involving sweat, salad dressing, urine — but that’s not my issue with Tampa. The sex is between a 26-year-old teacher and two of her 14-year-old students, but that too isn’t my biggest problem. What left me repulsed, traumatised and sick in the stomach is the young and beautiful teacher-predator’s description of her students and her reasons for picking them.

Celeste has sex with the boys not because they are more eager or easier to control but because she is a paedophile, one who is aroused by the thought of a 14-year-old boy’s “small fist punching up into me”.

She rejects any student if he’s already experienced the growth spurt of puberty. She craves a boy’s lanky limbs, not manly muscles.

All the while I was reading this book, I kept asking why: why has this book been written, why am I reading it, why isn’t anybody making more noise about its depraved contents? And when I found a group of boys practising their steps ahead of a dance competition at my hotel in Bhutan last week, I ran — literally ran away — lest my gaze be misinterpreted. Tampa messes with your mind.

The Times London article provided some respite. Nutting says she wrote this book to subvert the whole gender equation in statutory rape. It’s a noble cause. I was mollified for a moment.

But hey, nowhere in Tampa does Nutting make her reasons evident. Not once did I get her rather admirable motive while reading the torturous text. You can’t write a sick book and then give interviews explaining the whys. The debate about “too pretty to get away with anything... even rape” should have come through in the book itself.

Tampa, to me, is about Nutting trying to cleverly cash in on the fact that she went to high school with the infamous high-school predator Debra Lafave, as well as the aroused interest in erotic books in the last couple of years. And given the kind of attention she seems to have received — from The Times London to The Huffington Post to even faraway t2, it seems the world has fallen for her dirty trick.