It has been done much better before, say in Lady Chatterley's Lover - sexual obsession must be predicated on character realism. The stumbling block in this sense is that, leading protagonist Dino, emotionally vacuous and still mother-dependent, just can't conceivably attract the Lolita-esque (Nabokov, too, does the whole thing better)in a way in which will engage the reader's empathy. Yet he does. And she does. In fact they both do it quite often. Barely fleshed out characters, ironically, do get their flesh out - indeed if the novel is to achieve in any merit it's in the anatomical poetry rather than consistency in plot or characterisations.

I read it to the end, hence the two stars.

Definitely one for the beach.