My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Literary, Women’s Fiction, Dark Academia
“Come and be worshiped, come and be caressed,
My dark Vanessa, crimson-barred, my blest
My Admirable butterfly! Explain
How could you, in the gloom of Lilac Lane,
Have let uncouth, hysterical John Shade
Blubber your face, and ear, and shoulder-blade?”
“He compared my hair to the color of maple leaves, slipped poetry into my hands – Emily, Edna, Sylvia. He made me see myself as he did, a girl with the power to rise with red hair and eat him like air.”
“Shielded by the desk, he reaches down and pats my knee gently, gingerly, the way you might pet a dog before you’re sure it won’t turn mean and bite you. I don’t bite him. I don’t move. I don’t even breathe. He keeps writing notes on the poem while his other hand strokes my knee and my mind slips out of me. It brushes up against the ceiling so I can see myself from above – hunched shoulders, thousand-yard stare, bright red hair,”
“One afternoon Strane tells me my name originated with Jonathan Swift, the Irish writer, and Swift once knew a woman named Esther Vanhomrigh, nickname Essa. “He broke her name apart and put it back together as something new,” Strane said. “Van-essa become Vanessa. Became you.”
I don’t say it, but sometimes I feel like that’s exactly what he’s doing to me — breaking me apart, putting me back together as someone new.”
Vanessa is a naive and lonely girl, attending her second year at boarding school. Her mother hopes she finally makes some friends. That year instead of making friends, she finds herself the unwitting victim to an ugly predator, her 42 year old English professor. Groomed to believe that their “relationship” is a love affair, that they were destined to be together. When 20 years later he is accused of victimizing other girls, Vanessa remembers back to that year when she was 15, and how those actions have molded the rest of her life.
“I assume I’ll be the one he turns to in ten or fifteen years, whenever his body begins to break down. That seems the likely ending to this love story: me dropping everything and doing anything, devoted as a dog, as he takes and takes and takes.”
“Sometimes it feels like that’s all I’m doing every time I reach out – trying to haunt, to drag him back in time, asking him to tell me again what happened. Make me understand it once and for all. Because I’m still stuck here. I can’t move on.”
Devastatingly beautiful. Enthralled … how can something so horrible be written so beautifully. I was captivated from the start. You don’t want to put it down. Be aware that this contains very graphic instances of sexual abuse to a child, at times it is very difficult to read. To me it is just as difficult to hear Vanessa tell it like a love affair. The story goes back and forth between Vanessa as an adult and then as the 15 year girl reliving the juncture that changed her life forever. Definitely one of the best books I have read. It broke your heart for the young girl who didn’t understand that she was not at fault and who just wanted to be special. It angered me, the adults that did nothing and turned their backs in silence. I implored the adult to finally see the damage caused and heal.
View all my reviews
