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 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. ( )

DNF 32%

I've been waiting for like 6 years to have this book and read it and when I did it was only to be left with a bad taste in my mouth. I am tremendously disappointed and crushed, because forbidden love stories are my favorite, especially the teacher/student type however Teach Me didn't live up to my high expectations and to the faith I put in it :(

This story played out in my head like as if I saw it as a movie on Lifetime. The extent of craziness Nine plays out in the aftermath of the breakup is insane, indescribable. However, I couldn't put this book down - I just felt like I was reading the juiciest gossip of a lifetime (when did I turn into such a wine mom?). ( )

Another book read to help me prepare for my NaNoWriMo topic, and I've got to say my characters are nothing like these turned out to be. Thankfully. I'd let this sit at about 2.5 stars out of 5 just because it did manage to at least entertain me.

Nine is... really a terribly crazy person, and I thought so even before things in the affair went sour just because of the way she thought. Which, by the way. a lot of her supposedly smart thoughts were straight up incorrect. Not sure if the author didn't know what they were talking about or if she was meant to get some things wrong, but yeah. I found myself really wanting her to get in trouble for some of the crazy things she was doing and I had pretty much no sympathy for her by the end. The teacher was in the wrong as well, and that's coming from someone that has nothing against these sort of affairs in literature. Sure, he was a jerk, but I STILL don't think he deserved this level of crazy being thrown at him. Nine's poor parents and best friend were all so sweet, she doesn't deserve any of them really. All the time Mr. Mann said she was mature for her age and different- but he must have been blinded by "love" because the readers sure don't see any of that. Show- don't tell.

I'm not sure what else to say without rambling, just that it frightens me to see so many women/girls giving this a high rating and relating to the main character. ( )

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. ( )