Tag: Kate Elizabeth Russell

🏅Top Shelf Tuesday 🏅

Happy Tuesday everyone!

This week’s pick is:

My Dark Vanessa
by Kate Elizabeth Russell
Paperback
Published by William Morrow, March 2020

A much anticipated read for me and I finally got to it in January.   The cover is beautiful and it captivated me immediately.   I will be honest and say that I first picked this up without knowing any details of the plot.  I saw a quote from Stephen King, “A well constructed package of dynamite.” and felt I needed to check this out.  Not Disappointed!  

Definitely one of the best books I have read but also one of the hardest to read content wise. Devastatingly beautiful. Enthralled … how can something so horrible be written so beautifully.  It broke my 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.  It left me with so many different feelings at the end, I love that the most. 

See full Review here – Book Review – My Dark Vanessa

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Don’t Get Stuck in a Genre Rut

When I was younger I used to only read Stephen King, R.L. Stein, Dean Koontz, you get my drift, pretty much thriller and horror only.  When I was in High School, I stared my first job as a barista and found my co-worker’s copy of Nora Robert’s novel Lawless.  That was my intro into great Romance novels.  I very rarely left that comfort zone of those authors though. I had no idea the books I was missing out on. 

The past several years I have made changes in the way I choose what books to read and I have been picking up ones that I normally wouldn’t.  I join reading challenges that prompt me to choose books outside my comfort zone.  We are two months into the year so far and my genre resume has already been so vast, Literary Women’s Fiction, Contemporary Realistic Fiction, New Adult Romance, Literary Fiction, Crime and Comedy Thriller, Poetry, and Non-fiction Memoir.

Here are a few that I have thoroughly enjoyed recently:

I hope that this will give you the push to expand your reading beyond your comfort zone as well.  There is a whole world out there to explore.  Don’t be afraid to check them out.

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January Wrap Up

January Wrap Up:
3 Books
1,292 pages
Average Rating: 4.33

My Dark Vanessa 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Handle With Care 🌟🌟🌟🌟
The Upside of Falling Down 🌟🌟🌟🌟

Well I am a little behind in posting my wrap up but it’s been a little crazy here lately.

January was a pretty good month for me.  I stayed home and avoided all the madness going on around me in the country.  Having faith that somehow we as a society will work it all out. 

I read some great books!  I was hoping to complete 4 but I feel good about it taking into account how busy I was. 
We added 5 new reptiles 🐢🦎 to our collection.  Penelope (Penny) a Cherry head Red foot Tortoise, Echo a Bearded Dragon, and Ragnar, Lagertha, and Freya are our Shinisaurus Crocodilurus (Chinese Crocodile Lizards).  My husband does an amazing job on his enclosure builds.  So much goes in to getting everything set up for them that it doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for anything else.  😄

My Dark Vanessa was definitely the stand out for the month for me and probably for the year.  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.  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.

Handle with care is a heart jerker of a book for sure. Written in several points of view, directed toward the six year old daughter Willow who has Osteogenesis Imperfecta, a brittle bone disease.  Her parents are suing the OB-GYN for wrongful birth.  It’s definitely a conversation starter.

The Upside of Falling Down is a cute, easy, breezy New Age romance. Clementine wakes up in a hospital in Ireland with absolutely no memory; she was in a plane crash and she is the only survivor. 

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Book Review – My Dark Vanessa

My Dark Vanessa

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,”

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2021 – Book 1: A Dark Academia book

A Dark Academia book
(A book that has an academic setting, with characters that explore dark urges, crimes, or dark secrets)

This book has been on my TBR pile for too long and I have heard good things about it.  So I am going to start the new year off with this one first.  I think it fits so perfectly with this prompt too.
I love the cover, it’s so beautiful. I love the black and white with the deep purple spine.  It just draws you to it.

Blurb: 
Exploring the psychological dynamics of the relationship between a precocious yet naïve teenage girl and her magnetic and manipulative teacher, a brilliant, all-consuming read that marks the explosive debut of an extraordinary new writer.

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?

Alternating between Vanessa’s present and her past, My Dark Vanessa juxtaposes memory and trauma with the breathless excitement of a teenage girl discovering the power her own body can wield. Thought-provoking and impossible to put down, this is a masterful portrayal of troubled adolescence and its repercussions that raises vital questions about agency, consent, complicity, and victimhood. Written with the haunting intimacy of The Girls and the creeping intensity of Room, My Dark Vanessa is an era-defining novel that brilliantly captures and reflects the shifting cultural mores transforming our relationships and society itself.

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