A ‘love story’ with a dark premise
My Dark Vanessa
By Kate Elizabeth Russell,
Harper Collins, $37
My Dark Vanessa jumps between 2000 and 2017 where an adult Vanessa struggles to come to terms with her teenage relationship years earlier with her teacher.
She once viewed this relationship to be her first love but as she is backed into a corner by beliefs she has constantly defined her life by, she starts to comprehend her “love story” was darker and more complicated than she ever allowed herself to admit.
Vanessa gives harrowing insight and understanding into the unsettling topic of a teacher/student relationship. Every moment of her story is well captured and perfectly paced, with the author Kate Elizabeth Russell doing a magnificent job of making this psychological fiction a constant page-turner. The curious desire to understand a relationship between a 15-yearold girl and her 42-year-old English teacher is both overwhelming and captivating. It leaves readers feeling unsettled with how easily manipulation can occur in a power dynamic, yet despite the feeling of knowing what comes next, there is a need to try to understand a situation that has so often brushed under the carpet.
My Dark Vanessa takes the standard definition of rape and abuse and opens the reader’s mind to ask more questions surrounding these words, and definitions. It brings up #MeToo and delicately dances with the consequences of victim blaming. This book is confronting and uncomfortable but nevertheless it is a book that needs to be read to start to comprehend how abuse is not a situation that can be viewed under a black or white lens. It is far more grey and can take years to understand or even admit to.
My Dark Vanessa thrusts you back into the time of being a 15-year-old girl navigating a world you are yet to understand.
A thrilling book that can be related to, flirting with adulthood while still under the premise of being naive and desperate to be seen. Highly recommended for someone looking for an intoxicating, confronting book that leaves an after taste you can’t quite get rid of. It will have you rereading chapters and asking questions for days.