My Dark Vanessa: A Novel
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
“[An] exceedingly complex, inventive, resourceful examination of harm and power.” —The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice
“A lightning rod . . . brilliantly crafted.”—The Washington Post
Recommended by The New York Times • USA Today • Entertainment Weekly • Marie Claire • Elle • Harper's Bazaar • Newsweek • New York Post • Esquire • Real Simple • The Sunday Times • The Guardian • and more!
Exploring the psychological dynamics of the relationship between a precocious yet naïve teenage girl and her magnetic and manipulative teacher, a brilliant, all-consuming read that marks the explosive debut of an extraordinary new writer.
2000. Bright, ambitious, and yearning for adulthood, fifteen-year-old Vanessa Wye becomes entangled in an affair with Jacob Strane, her magnetic and guileful forty-two-year-old English teacher.
2017. Amid the rising wave of allegations against powerful men, a reckoning is coming due. Strane has been accused of sexual abuse by a former student, who reaches out to Vanessa, and now Vanessa suddenly finds herself facing an impossible choice: remain silent, firm in the belief that her teenage self willingly engaged in this relationship, or redefine herself and the events of her past. But how can Vanessa reject her first love, the man who fundamentally transformed her and has been a persistent presence in her life? Is it possible that the man she loved as a teenager—and who professed to worship only her—may be far different from what she has always believed?
Alternating between Vanessa’s present and her past, My Dark Vanessa juxtaposes memory and trauma with the breathless excitement of a teenage girl discovering the power her own body can wield. Thought-provoking and impossible to put down, this is a masterful portrayal of troubled adolescence and its repercussions that raises vital questions about agency, consent, complicity, and victimhood. Written with the haunting intimacy of The Girls and the creeping intensity of Room, My Dark Vanessa is an era-defining novel that brilliantly captures and reflects the shifting cultural mores transforming our relationships and society itself.
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Community Reviews
My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell
369 pages
What’s it about?
This novel goes back and forth between 2000 and 2017. In 2000 Vanessa is a fifteen-year-old scholarship student at a prestigious East Coast boarding school when she becomes entangled in a sexual relationship with her much older teacher. Vanessa is the unreliable narrator of both time periods. In 2000 we view her relationship as it unfolds with the manipulative Mr. Strane. By 2017 Vanessa is trying to make sense of what happened to her seventeen years ago. In both instances Vanessa reveals herself as a complicated and complicit victim....
What did it make me think about?
Is there really such a thing as a complicit victim? Can a fifteen-year-old be complicit?
Should I read it?
This was just a dark book with a dark subject. It was graphic in detail and often difficult to read.... yet it was also a page-turner. Vanessa was so complicated that although you wanted to like her, it was hard. Ms. Russell managed to portray the complexities Vanessa faces when she looks back at her relationship with Mr. Strane.
Quote-
"I never would have done it if you weren't so willing, he'd said. It sounds like delusion. What girl would want what he did to me? But it's the truth, whether anyone believes it or not. Driven toward it, toward him, I was the kind of girl that isn't supposed to exist: one eager to hurl herself into the path of a pedophile.
But no, that word isn't right, never has been. It's a cop-out, a lie in the way it's wrong to call me a victim and nothing more. He was never so simple; neither was I."
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The subject is dark and heavy. It captures the ebb and flow of being a victim and all the nasty beautiful complexity that comes from suffering a trauma. It kept me reading but felt a little guilt at times and had to put the book down and come back to it after some headspace away.
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