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.
“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,”
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.
