A review by crybabybea
My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

challenging dark reflective sad tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

 
“No,” she says, “you didn’t fail me. Or, if you did, then I did, too. I knew he’d hurt other girls and it still took me years to do anything about it.” She looks up at me then, her eyes two blue pools. “What could we have done? We were just girls.”

I know what she means—not that we were helpless by choice, but that the world forced us to be. Who would have believed us, who would have cared?

Beautiful and terrible. This book healed something in me that I wasn’t expecting. Yes, it was incredibly triggering, dark, and harrowing. Seriously, if you have experienced abuse or are at all sensitive to abuse, PLEASE be careful picking this up. It is grim. There is no joy, and Vanessa experiences nothing but pain throughout the entirety of the book.
 
That being said, the themes that Kate Elizabeth Russell tackles are masterfully done. This novel is compared to Lolita for obvious reasons (and Lolita plays a huge part in the story as well), but the author adds a layer of complexity that brings it to relevancy in the modern era.

Vanessa (our stand-in Dolores) is very deliberately aged up to 15. She is young and naïve, but beginning to understand the adult world, adult desires, and grappling with emotions and feelings that many girls know too well. I appreciated Vanessa’s character so much. Typically, when you read stories about abuse from the POV of those who experience it, they tend to be pictured very specifically; bright-eyed and innocent, they unknowingly wander into the wolf’s den and are snatched up and devoured. There’s almost a sense of tip-toeing around darker characterizations and inner worlds, a fear of adding complications to the “perfect victim”. Vanessa, however, is realistic and complicated. She’s reeling with teenaged melancholy, trying to make sense of big feelings that nobody understands. She feels invisible, like she doesn’t matter and nobody notices her. So, when she’s presented with the opportunity to push the boundaries of what is right, and finds a supply of attention and adoration, she pushes it. She is naïve as any teenager is, but there is part of her that thinks she likes the danger and the attention.

Of course, she is innocent, just as innocent as 12-year-old Dolores or any other young person who experiences abuse. In no way am I implying that she deserved anything that happened to her, or implying that she was “asking for it”. Nor do I believe that she had “a darkness” within her that caused her to seek these things out (something that Jacob Strane uses to groom her and convince her that something is wrong with her). She is a young girl experiencing big feelings in a world where young girls with big feelings are at best swept under the rug, and at worst ridiculed and humiliated. She’s too young to understand the depth of what is happening to her and the lasting consequences the experiences will have, but she’s not young enough that she doesn’t at least slightly understand her own desires and autonomy. Her relationship with Jacob Strane is, in a twisted way, her way to feel some sort of control and empowerment in a time where she has none. This is the sort of complexity that My Dark Vanessa seeks to explore.

Along the same lines, Jacob Strane is a better-written antagonist than is usually shown in these sorts of stories. I can’t say he is necessarily complex, since we don’t get his POV and he isn’t the focus of the story, but I appreciated the way the author chose to write him. In the book, he isn’t unbelievably handsome, incredibly intelligent or wealthy, or irresistibly charismatic. In fact, he’s an off-putting weirdo with anger issues and Vanessa herself admits that he is ugly, that he disgusts her. He doesn’t even know how to cook anything besides toast and eggs. In the scenes where he manipulates and gaslights Vanessa, he is clearly pathetic, an insecure worm that needs constant reassurance from a teenager that he isn’t a bad person. He isn’t a supervillain mastermind who is able to manipulate anyone on a whim and turn the whole world against you. He’s simply an average man that exists in a system that enables him to take advantage of his position and power with no consequences. The scenes of manipulation and gaslighting are so chillingly well-done, although sometimes I felt like the author held the reader’s hand a bit too much, I understand why with such a sensitive subject.

In that, the author also dips her toe into critiquing the systems in place that protect abusers like Jacob Strane. The school is complicit, with so many adults turning the other way, or making a cute joke out of Jacob Strane and Vanessa’s clearly inappropriate relationship. It also asks the question, when young girls are isolated by design, at once sexualized and infantilized, minimized and disbelieved, at what point are we all complicit in the abuse they face? The contemporary inclusion of modern movements such as #MeToo and social media storms expound upon these questions even more. What makes someone a victim? What happens when the victim isn’t perfect, when the victim isn’t a rule-abiding, modest little girl with braces and pigtails? What if the victim doesn’t believe they are a victim? Or a survivor? How much responsibility should be placed on the shoulders of victims to speak out, and how helpful is it really for predatory journalists and activists to get involved? This book will challenge you if you haven’t already deconstructed your preconceived idea of victimhood.

Although it’s a smaller part of the story, I found Vanessa’s experience as an adult reconciling her memories of the relationship to be so well done. Again, in stories like this, there tends to be one narrative that follows the same plot beats. The victim fights, gets justice, goes to therapy, heals, maybe finds a new healthy relationship and lives happily ever after. The one thing I would have liked to see just a bit more of was an exploration of Vanessa’s relationship with her mother. The scenes we got between them were so dynamic and nuanced, and I think the author would have done a great job pushing it a bit further. I still found their relationship to be realistic and accurate. Not only is Vanessa dealing with the lifelong repercussions of the abuse, how can the relationship between mother and daughter move forward when she so obviously failed Vanessa? It’s such an interesting bit of the story.

And finally, I connected so much to the ending. It reminded me a lot of I’m Glad My Mom Died,
  in the sense that the emotional trauma experienced by Vanessa made it impossible for her to cut ties with her abuser, and the only way she was able to begin to move on was with his death. Her journey isn’t perfect, in fact she has to do a lot of inner healing and deconstructing to even see herself as a victim. She hurts people. She uses people for her benefit. She destroys her body, her relationships, her mind. I loved, after page after page of grim realizations and horrific abuse, the teeny, teeny, teeny glimpse of hope on the very last page.


Overall, I found My Dark Vanessa to be a realistic, if horrifying, depiction of the realities of girlhood and survivorship, and a poignant critique on systems that allow abuse of power to be so pervasive.
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