Emily Maguire and her publishers know what sells. On the cover of her first novel is a pull-out quote about how easily a pair of breasts can cause a man to lose his dignity, and an image of a naked female torso – artfully arranged, of course, so you can just sec the curve of the buttocks. Between the covers, Taming the Beast reeks of stale semen, grease and alcohol. With unrelenting grimness, unleavened by humour or light, Maguire examines the ramifications of sexual abuse when precocious fourteen-year-old schoolgirl Sarah Clark is seduced by her married English teacher, Daniel Carr. The book dispenses with coy preliminaries: by the third page, the ingenue ‘with hardly enough to fill a training bra’ is being fondled in the classroom; soon after, sexual congress between teacher and pupil is under way. Later, private tutorials see Donne’s sonnets employed as foreplay and the literal meaning of ‘the beast with two backs’ explored with gusto. Such reckless lovemaking sets the tone for the rest of the book. Taming the Beast is not so much erotic as desperate and grubby. Within its pages, there is illegal sex, sadomasochistic sex, sex with married men, sex as recreation, as therapy, as punishment, as reward. There is, in fact, too much sex at the expense of any other narrative ploy.