Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Valerie Flores

Author:   Kate Elizabeth Russell

Genre:    Fiction

385  pages, published  March 10, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

My Dark Vanessa  tells the haunting story of 15 year old Vanessa Wye, a fifteen year old girl, and her long term romantic entanglement with Jacob Strane, her 42 year old English teacher a private boarding school.  Author Kate Elizabeth Russell explores the psychological dynamics of the relationship between a precocious yet naïve teenage girl and her magnetic and manipulative teacher and how Vanessa slowly comes to terms with the true nature of the liason.

Quotes 

“I can’t lose the thing I’ve held onto for so long, you know?” My face twists up from the pain of pushing it out. “I just really need it to be a love story, you know? I really, really need it to be that.” “I know,” she says. “Because if it isn’t a love story, then what is it”? I look to her glassy eyes, her face of wide open empathy. “It’s my life,” I say. “This has been my whole life.”

 

“People will risk everything for a little bit of something beautiful.”

“Because even if I sometimes use the word abuse to describe certain things that were done to me, in someone else’s mouth the word turns ugly and absolute. It swallows up everything that happened.”

 

“Kneeling before me, he lays his head on my lap and says, ‘I’m going to ruin you.”

 

“To be groomed is to be loved and handled like a precious, delicate thing.”

 

“I wonder how much victimhood they’d be willing to grant a girl like me.”

 

“Pathetically in love with you.” As soon as he says this, I become someone somebody else is in love with, and not just some dumb boy my own age but a man who has already lived an entire life, who has done and seen so much and still thinks I’m worthy of his love. I feel forced over a threshold, thrust out of my ordinary life into a place where it’s possible for grown men to be so pathetically in love with me they fall at my feet.”

 

“He wants to make sure he’ll always be there, no matter what. He wants to leave his fingerprints all over me, every piece of muscle and bone.”

 

“I don’t say it, but sometimes I feel like that’s exactly what he’s doing to me—breaking me apart, putting me back together as someone new.”

 

“Strane says I need to contextualize my reluctance to grow up, that everyone my age is drawn to self-victimization. “And that mentality is especially difficult for young women to resist,” he says. “The world has a vested interest in keeping you helpless.” He says as a culture we treat victimhood as an extension of childhood. So when a woman chooses victimhood, she is therefore freed from personal responsibility, which then compels others to take care of her, which is why once a woman chooses victimhood, she will continue to choose it again and again.”

 

“I’m starting to understand that the longer you get away with something, the more reckless you become, until it’s almost as if you want to get caught.”

 

“This, I think, is the cost of telling, even in the guise of fiction. Once you do, it’s the only thing about you anyone will ever care about. It defines you whether you want it to or not.”

 

“Girls in those stories are always victims, and I am not. And it doesn’t have anything to do with what Strane did or didn’t do to me when I was younger. I’m not a victim because I never wanted to be, and If I didn’t want to be, then I’m not. That’s how it works. The difference between rape and sex is state of mind. You can’t rape the willing, right?”

 

“He touched me first, said he wanted to kiss me, told me he loved me. Every first step was taken by him. I don’t feel forced, and I know I have the power to say no, but that isn’t the same as being in charge. But maybe he has to believe that. Maybe there’s a whole list of things he has to believe.”

 

“Somehow I sensed what was coming for me even then. Really, though, what girl doesn’t? It looms over you, that threat of violence. They drill the danger into your head until it starts to feel inevitable. You grow up wondering when it’s finally going to happen.”

 

“The excuses we make for them are outrageous, but they’re nothing compared with the ones we make for ourselves.”

 

“Hide all you want, but the truth will always find you.”

My Take

While the Lolitaesq premise of My Dark Vanessa is disturbing on many levels, it is an engrossing, page turner that sucks you into its story.  Author Kate Elizabeth Russell does a masterful job of showing the reader how easily this atrocity could happen and how hard it is of protagonist Vanessa Wye to let go of her idealized version of the past.