Tom Perrotta is a likable writer, but I find that his books don’t have much sticking power. For me, The Abstinence Teacher didn’t even begin to measure up to my favorite of Perrotta’s novels, The Wishbones, or the very engaging Little Children, his previous release.

The Abstinence Teacher is set in suburban New York. A high school sex education teacher runs afoul of a local fundamentalist church and finds herself teaching an abstinence-only curriculum that she absolutely does not agree with. Then she discovers that her daughter’s attractive soccer coach is a reformed drug addict who is a member of the same church and who stirs up a brouhaha by leading the team in prayer after a game.

The main thing that irritated me about the narrative was the way it jumped around in time without much rhyme or reason. Just as I’m settling into a scene, I’m thrust two days into the past, or the action segues into the previous night. And the characters themselves seemed ineffectual and unable to take a strong stand on any of their supposedly closely held beliefs, or even on their attraction to each other. Which was probably the point, but I think this theme is getting a little worn out in Perrotta’s fiction. We’ve had the futility of modern suburban life before; let’s move on to some new material.

Which isn’t to say that I didn’t like the book. I actually liked it well enough while I was reading it, and I tore through it pretty fast. But when it was over, it was the literary equivalent of popcorn: not filling, not satisfying, no sticking power. I want to love Tom Perrotta as a writer, I really do, but his books just don’t awaken that level of passion in me, no matter how much I try.