My Dark Vanessa

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell
Reviewed by Jack
📘📘📘📘📘

My Dark Vanessa is one of the most affecting and powerful works of fiction I have read for a long time.

From speaking to various Candid members I knew this was going to be a difficult read but nothing could prepare me for just how arresting and difficult this book was going to be.

Russell masterfully brings us into the world of Vanessa, a victim of grooming by her English teacher while at a boarding school in the US. The choice to write this book as a first person narrative was a brilliant one and Russell writes astonishingly from this perspective, really allowing us, as readers, to get swept up in the thought processes of an abused individual. The constant reasoning that there is nothing wrong with her relationship with Mr Strane even began to convince me as a reader at certain (rare) points before reality would snap back and you realise just how awful the situation, and the character of Strane, truly was. My hatred of Strane rose to alarming levels as I continued to read and truly made me think of the emotional, psychological and physical damage victimhood of this kind inflicts on those being abused.

I genuinely felt sick reading so much of this story and literally shouted at my book at one point - a testament to how invested I was and the scale of the all-consuming nature of the prose. A must-read but definitely not an easy one!