Book Review: My Dark Vanessa

INTRODUCTION

            I’m angry at the romance genre. That’s quite a blanket statement, but for the most part, it’s true. In recent times, the romance genre has lowered women’s standards. Authors like Colleen Hoover influence people to believe that abuse is love (see It Ends With Us). Abusers can be forgiven and even loved again. One of her books, Slammed, is about a high school student (freshly 18, don’t worry) enters a relationship with her 21-year-old poetry teacher. On Story Graph, Slammed is labeled a young adult romance novel. That is, the intention of writing the student-teacher relationship was to provide young-adults with a forbidden fantasy- an indulgence.

            All of this is to say that My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell is the perfect antithesis to books like Slammed. It tells the dark, terrifying truth about student-teacher relationships, grooming, and how trauma can fester until it explodes later in life without labeling it a romance.

OVERVIEW (from the publisher’s site)

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?

THOUGHTS

            I gave My Dark Vanessa a 5/5 stars on Story Graph. Russell showed the deepest care for the subject and while it was painfully uncomfortable, it was moving. When we meet Vanessa in 2017, we’re screaming at her because she is convinced her teacher, Strane, did not groom her in any way. She still believes her fifteen-year-old self was in love with her teacher. It’s frustrating but because Russell shows us exactly what happened to get Vanessa to this point, it’s hard to argue with her.

            The technical writing is flawless. Russell’s use of imagery and figurative language transports the reader through the page and into Vanessa’s boarding school. At Barnes and Noble, My Dark Vanessa can usually be found on the Dark Academia table—a decision I agree with. The book is comparable to Nabokov’s haunting classic, Lolita, and Russell acknowledges this from the very start, even dedicating the book to Lolita’s Dolores. The 1955 novel is woven into the pages of Vanessa’s story; Strane even uses it as a way to explain and justify his sexual attraction.

            Over the course of the novel, Vanessa slowly comes to terms with her trauma. It’s agonizing for the reader because we know from page one that what she went through was awful, but she doesn’t. It’s only after another student comes forward, accusing Strane of sexual abuse, that Vanessa even considers the possibility that she too was a victim. Russell paints a story that has us rooting and booing the main character every other page.

            Read the trigger warnings. Read the trigger warnings. Read the trigger warnings. My Dark Vanessa is not a book to be picked up lightly. As a reviewer, it is my responsibility to warn people that the novel can be triggering to people with any sort of sexual trauma. The novel’s content is a hard read for anyone, but it’s especially hard for those who understand Vanessa completely. Take great care when reading Russell’s book.

Lorraine Durbin ’26 is a creative writing major at Susquehanna University with a specialization in creative non-fiction