my dark vanessa: maple red hair & lolita
- paigenherbooks
- Aug 11, 2024
- 4 min read
Updated: Aug 11, 2024
4/5
Reflective. Repulsive. Raw. Real.
The four words that I would use to describe My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell.
A story that layers intense thematic nuances while also shoving it into the readers face. A novel that dives deep into what is love? What is hate? If it isn’t love, than what is it? Manipulation, sexual abuse, trauma, and terror all play their parts excessively well within this novel, stringing together one girls story of falling in love, of falling, of being taken advantage of and held tight, too close to the situation to ever see the full picture. My Dark Vanessa was haunting to listen to yet educating to reflect on.
Synopsis: 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.
My Dark Vanessa follows Vanessa, our main character who is taking us through her life, intertwining her adolescence and her current adult life. The two timelines give exposition when most needed, letting us – the reader be able to understand fully why Vanessa is the way she is, why she can’t let go, why she is so shackled to her silence. Her current time line, years after everything, is impactful as it is insightful. Showing us the reality of what something like what Vanessa went through can do to a person, how the shame and guilt, the confusion can creep over your entire life without you even noticing. How truly hard it can be to accept certain facts about your life because in doing so it feels overwhelming, it feels like too much.
It turns everything you’ve built, all the walls of your secure castle start to crumble and reality is waiting outside the door. Vanessa was stuck behind her walls, continuing to manipulate herself and often times others so that she wouldn’t have to face the true facts, because if she did, it would change everything.
Vanessa’s refusal to accept the truth, her denial of it all was excessively frustrating at times. I physically wanted to scream and shake the living daylights out of this poor fictional girl. It can be a tough read/listen. Hearing Vanessa say that what had happen to her was love, that she wanted it, that she didn’t want to jump on the bandwagon of victims. You hate her at times, wanting to slap some sense into her, but that’s the point. This is Vanessa’s journey, this is so many different men and women’s journey where denial is their only way of self preservation.
The only way they can rationalize what had occur to them. The moments when Vanessa starts to have her breakthrough, to start truly understanding and looking at her life, were beautiful and moving. The breath you had been holding the entire time finally pushes out of you and you’re ready for the next chapter of her life.
The other timeline, the one where you learn what exactly happened to Vanessa was also insightful. Seeing the world through the eyes of a fifteen year old and knowing that she is so incessantly idiotic but knowing that she is only fifteen, only a child, makes her story all the more haunting. The manipulation that Vanessa faces and the inner turmoil her relationship with Strane causes was something that was often times hard to listen/read about. Hearing her struggle with the understandings of what was occurring of being confused why she loved him but hated him at the same time.
For building her entire life around him, how could she not? He worshiped her, loved her, jeopardized his whole career and life for her, what more could a young girl ask for? As the story progresses and you start to get into Vanessa’s head more you start to feel for her, mourn her childhood with her and hope that with each turning of the page she will simply run away or that Strane will die or that something will happen to where she can leave it all behind.
Alas, it doesn’t happen.
You watch with terror filled eyes as assault after assault takes place, manipulation drenching her like syruped pancakes at the local diner. It’s reflective. As someone who identifies heavily with parts of Vanessa’s story there were times I had to turn the audio book off, times I just cried and times I realized a lot about myself and the situations I have been through. The same idiotic decisions I also made in my youth and how it affects me now. The way I too, rationalized things, because if it wasn’t love, than what was it? Oftentime that question is too much to bare, too much to answer, and too much to think about. Vanessa struggles with feelings of hatred towards everyone and her self, feelings of disgust, feelings of wondering why her, why me?
The implication and introduction of the #MeToo movement within the storyline was an interesting component that I wasn’t totally expecting. I remember hearing about it when I was in highschool not fullying grasping what it meant or stood for until I found myself in a situation where I could identify, where I could say “me too”, where I would have killed just for one person to believe me, to see me, to help me.
Vanessa struggles with this concept of being a victim of letting the things that have happened to her define her. She rejects being a part of a group as if she does so, it feels like she has identified herself, that she can’t pretend she is someone else entirely. Coming forward, telling your story doesn’t label you as a victim, it shows that you’ve overcome being a victim, that you were one and you survived. In the most cliche way (believe me I know) there's strength and freedom in being honest.
My Dark Vanessa was a novel I happened into, one that I saw friends read and figured I would give it a try. In hindsight I’m glad I did, it was vivaciously reflective for me in more ways than one, though triggering as well. It’s a story of a girl who overcomes. A story of a girl that many men and women will see themselves in. A story that ushers in many a discussion.
A story that I’m glad I read but will never read again.
I believe you.
xoxo,
paige
Comments