A review by lostinpaperbacks
Being Lolita: A Memoir, by Alisson Wood

challenging dark emotional informative inspiring reflective sad tense

4.0

I came across this book after reading My Dark Vanessa a few months ago, I was intrigued and heard good things about this one.   There were so many similarities it was uncanny, but this is an actual memoir. Ironically enough, I enjoyed the fictionalized My Dark Vanessa a tad more.  This memoir is completely consuming---I finished it in a matter of hours! About an hour and a half to be exact. Ms. Wood manages to handle such delicate topics and complicated emotions with effortless ability. Not once does she idealize her abuser, even in her reflections of her past, but she still manages to give the reader a sense of how easily a situation can spiral and how quickly innocence can be stolen with the right words and actions. This was a good read, but it harped just a little too much on Lolita's book. I've never read it, so these passages did not speak to me and became a bit monotonous. So, I've read two eerily similar books in a short amount of time, and apparently, there is a sickening formula to this kind of inappropriate seduction of a minor student. Definitely read the TWS before reading this but overall thank you to Allison Wood for putting her story out into this world.
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