This is an incredible book. Dark, gritty and hard reading, this deals with the subject of abuse and grooming by a person of power. This is such an important and relatable book that deals with issues around power, desire and the after effects of grooming so fantastically. The characters are complex, human and flawed and Kate Elizabeth Russell's writing is flowing and will hook you instantly. A must read.

Quite a dark read, not surprising the topic it covers. But it is quite disturbing and raises a lot of questions that aren't easy to answer. Very difficult to read, but also very hard to put down.

★★★✰✰ 3 stars

“I think we’re very similar, Nessa,” he whispers. “From the way you write, I can tell you’re a dark romantic like me. You like dark things.”


Recently I read a nonfiction book which claimed that when reading a book “However you get it, you’ve got it right”. When I read those words I found them vaguely patronising and equivocal. Case in point, in My Dark Vanessa the misreading of a novel has disastrous consequences.
When fifteen year old Vanessa is given a copy of Lolita by her forty-five year old teacher, Jacob Strane, she becomes obsessed with it and comes to regard it as a tragic love story. In her eyes Humbert Humbert is not a degenerate pedophile but an unlucky man who happens to fall in love with a twelve-year old girl.

“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.”


Narrated by Vanessa, Kate Elizabeth Russell’s novel opens up in 2017 when the #MeToo movement became viral. Vanessa, a disillusioned thirty-something concierge, is forced to re-evaluate her relationship to Strane after one of his former students, Taylor Birch, writes a Facebook post accusing him of assault. Although Vanessa is still in touch with Strane, the two are no longer ‘involved’, and she believes that “Everything [Taylor] wrote is a lie”. Yet, even as she tells herself this, there is a niggling doubt at the back of her mind. When Taylor messages her asking her to share her own experience with Strane, Vanessa finds herself wading back in time in order to re-examine her relationship to Strane.

“I know what he thinks, what anyone would think. That I’m an apologist, an enabler, but I’m defending myself just as much as I am Strane. Because even if sometimes I use the word abuse to describe certain things that were done to me, in someone else’s mouth, the word turns ugly and absolute. It swallows up everything that happened.”


In 2000 fifteen-year old Vanessa returns to her second year at Browick, a private school in Norumbega, Maine (although I don’t believe a town called Norumbega actually exists Russell vivid depiction of this fictional place makes it seem all too real). Vanessa is all too aware of being a loner. She feels that her red hair, her lack of friends, and her penchant for morose observations distance her from her peers, so it isn't all that surprising that Vanessa initially ‘responds’ positively to Strane’s attentions. He compliments her appearance and her writing, and soon enough Vanessa starts to believe that he is attentive because he thinks that she is ‘special’.
Vanessa regards her relationship to Strane as a consensual love story hindered by an age-gap. The only reason why she entertains the possibility of it having unethical is because he was her teacher. Yet, when Vanessa revisits her past, she does not always able to romanticise Strane and his actions.
The first few graphic scenes between them felt horrifyingly necessary. In spite of the superficial charm that Strane uses in order to make his abhorrent actions appear ‘darkly romantic’ readers are aware of his true nature. He is a perverted manipulator who masks his inclination for young girls under the guise of being a hopeless romantic, as if he is a blameless victim of love. He instills in Vanessa his own skewed perception of their relationship, he uses her own insecurity against her (time and again her reminds her that she is ‘special’), and makes her feel complicit. Often he draws similarities between them (for example he tells her they both have the same ‘darkness’) in order to make her feel as if it is ‘them’ against the world. Strane also uses Vanessa’s poetry against her as he attributes to her poems and verses mature and inappropriate meanings (for instance he calls one of her poems “sexy”...).
Strane also implements Lolita in order to introduce to Vanessa the possibility of an adult-child ‘relationship’, and while he often compares Vanessa to Lolita, he refuses to cast himself as Humbert (“Is that what you think I am?” He asks. “A pedophile?”).

The novel does a terrific job in portraying the power-imbalance between a grown man and a teenager girl. Strane uses his age and experience to manipulate Vanessa, often leading her to believe that she is the ‘boss’. His disgusting behaviour is rendered in minute detail as the author does not shy away from portraying him at his most repugnant.
Rather than ‘empowering’ Vanessa however he is disenfranchising her. He convinces her that she is ‘precocious’ and far more mature and independent that the other girls her age.

“Every first step was taken by him. I don’t feel forced, and I know I have the power to say no, but that isn’t the same as being in charge.”


While we are made to see how Strane manages to convince Vanessa that they are mutually complicit, two ‘dark romantics’, his charm never reached me. Everything he says and does felt wrong and illicit. While Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert admits to himself that he likes little girls, Strane seems to actually believe that he has fallen in love with Vanessa not because of her age but in spite of it. Yet, as present-Vanessa grudgingly realises, he would find it arousing to infantilise her and his attraction for her diminishes as she grows ‘older’.

“Like I was crazy. A stupid, crazy little girl. I get why you did that. It was an easy way to protect yourself, right? Teenage girls are crazy. Everyone knows that.”


While I think that this novel does an exceptional job in depicting Vanessa’s horrifying story of abuse (she would dislike my using this word but I call it what it is) I did not feel incredibly affected by it and for the most part I was disgusted.
Strane was the only character who struck me as believable...and he was a monster. Vanessa however remains more ‘blurred’. While this is surely somewhat intentional (the trauma caused by Strane has had horrific repercussions on her life and her sense of self) it also made it harder for me to believe in her as a character. Her dissociation and alienation are a result of her ‘relationship’ with Strane and his presence in her life is toxic , that much is clear. Still, she often makes out-of-character choices or big decisions without any distinct reason. There are two instances were she makes potentially life-changing decisions without articulating the reason behind her actions. Much was made of her ‘darkness’ but I could only see it as a consequence of Strane’s gaslighting her. Part of me wished that we could have seen her before him, perhaps during her first year at Browick. That way we could have gotten to know her on her own terms, and not as Strane’s victim (not that Vanessa labels herself as victim or survivor, in fact she hates these terms: “But that word, with its cloying empathy, that patronizing, flattening word that makes my whole body cringe no matter the context”).

At times there were moments were more could have been made of her personality. Even if Strane has forced her into taking on this role of ‘Lolita’, there could still be some traces of her own distinctive personality. Her job sadly seems merely to recount in an almost detached way Strane’s repulsive actions towards her. And if she is totally disconnected from her own self than I wish we could have been at least made privy to what she was thinking when she makes those potentially life-altering decisions (usually she just describes her movements or surroundings in these instances).
There are many other characters but they all blurred together. Once again this may be deliberate, given that Vanessa herself knows that she struggles keeping people straight in her mind. However, even during those scenes set in her past, I found that the characters to be lacking: there were a few named J-something and I could barely distinguish them from one another. Most of them seem to have been included only to say or do something to hurt Vanessa. Their motivations were sketchy and given that their personalities remain off-page, I had difficulties believing them.
Vanessa’s parents are incongruously depicted. Her mother seems to undergo three or four changes of character in the course of the novel. The father is totally expandable. Maybe if they had more page-time, I could have seen glimpses of their personalities and of their thoughts. Not only do we never know how they felt about their daughter’s time at Browick but the few times where we see their behaviour it seemed to be all over the place.

“So if someone doesn’t want to come forward and tell the world every bad thing that’s happened to her, then she’s what? Weak, selfish?”


While I appreciated the way the novel unflinchingly discusses sexual and emotional abuse, its praise and critique of certain aspects of the #MeToo movement, as well as its incorporation of texts (Lolita and Ethan Frome) and historical figures/anecdotes which can be used to normalise or romanticise ‘relationships’ between under age girls and middle aged men, I found that much of the narrative relied on explicit content. The first few times, as I already mentioned, I thought that however revolting these scenes were necessary. Needless to say, these scenes were not easy to read. Strane eroticises his fifteen-yearl old student and makes Vanessa believe that, like Lolita, she is ‘precociously seductive’. Although Vanessa tells herself that she enjoys this feeling of making a grown man sexually desire her, readers will have a less rose-tinted view of things. Although their first encounters are graphic, I did not see these as being included for shock value. However, as these scenes grew in number, I grew tired of them...they made me want to gag and to be repeatedly exposed to them seemed unnecessary. If anything they made the first explicit scenes less impactful.
Sometimes keeping certain things off the page isn’t a sign of ‘cowardice’ or ‘sensibleness’. If anything it requires even more effort to make your audience aware of certain ‘transgressions’ without having to actually to include them. For instance, in a recent episode of one of my favourite tv shows, a character is forced into the realisation that he was abused as a child. Rather than cutting to a tasteless flashback of this, the camera remains trained on his face, and viewers can see the incalculable hurt that this abuse caused him. His trauma, anguish, and despair are conveyed without the episode having to actually show this abuse happening.
Another example I can give is by the great Stephen King (who happens to have appreciated My Dark Vanessa more than I did, given that he described it as a ‘package of dynamite’) who in his latest novel avoids depicting in horrific detail a scene in which a child is tortured, cutting instead to the before and the after. Even if he doesn’t include e the ‘during’ scene, his readers can clearly see the harmful effects that this maltreatment has had on the child in question.
Sadly, I found that once I was 30% into My Dark Vanessa the graphic scenes lost some of their significance. They were so lurid that I could not see why there had to be so many of them. I get that some were meant to show us why present-Vanessa has such as distorted perception of her sexuality but when a story relies on numerous revolting sex scenes...I loose interest. I don’t find ‘splatter’ films to be good horror films, so perhaps it shouldn't surprise me that I wasn’t all that impressed with My Dark Vanessa.
Additionally this year I read two other books that deal with similar topics. What Red Was is a stark novel that depicts the lasting effects of rape on a young woman's mind, body, and life. I found that novel poignant and heart-wrenching. Promising Young Women instead tells an imaginative and subversive story of a relationship between a female employee and her boss. Those two novels resonated with me a lot more than My Dark Vanessa did. In Russell's novel, the only character that was truly believable happens to be one of the most disgustingly perverse characters I've read of in a while. For all her self-fashioning, Vanessa did not strike me as ‘dark’ or even ‘precocious’. For the most part she is passive and apathetic towards other people. In one scene she willingly stands by as one of her young colleagues is harassed by a patron. In those instances where she is spurred into action, I still could not understand her or her motivations. More could have been made of her sense of loneliness and of her fraught relationship with her mother.
The novel takes its time discussing the guilt she feels, and by the end I just wanted this novel to end.

“But it’s the truth, even if no one believes it. Driven towards it, towards him, I was the kind of girl that isn’t supposed to exist: eager to hurl herself into the swamp.”


Still, future readers should not be deterred by my not so positive review. So far most of the reviews for this novel are glowing and singing this book’s praises. Heck, even King liked it...so maybe I’m not the right reader for it...I can't help it but I found some of Russell's descriptions to be trying (eg: “dishwater blonde hair and granola clothes”) and I was frustrated by the way in which she would convey Vanessa's distress or her anguish (Vanessa bites her cheeks a lot).
There are some great discussions in here (about abuse, guilt, gender, power) and while this is ultimately a story of an uneasy self-reconciliation, it is one that is as uplifting as a work Joyce Carol Oates (ie. pretty depressing).

Wow, what a terribly emotional read. It had my heart torn in a million pieces and constantly needing to read more and more. I found it to be a very important read, especially knowing the lengths Vanessa went to protect her abuser, because as parents, administrators, teachers, friends, I believe we could truly learn from this book. Be ready to have your heart broke and be in different thoughts at different times, but also able to be thankful you can see it from outside instead of in.
Will make sure I buzz this book up everywhere!

My Dark Vanessa certainly lives up to its name; dark, absorbing and very disturbing. Vanessa is a small town girl with a scholarship for a preppy boarding school where she doesn’t fit in. She’s fallen out with her only friend and so, lonely, clever and vulnerable, she is delighted when her teacher singles her out. Soon his attention makes her feel special, validated and so when that attention gets physical, Vanessa is compliant, blocking out any unpleasant reality in order to keep hold of the power she tells herself she has.

Over a decade later other allegations against her teacher surface and a journalist tries to persuade her to tell her story but Vanessa refuses. It’s not the affair that’s responsible for her drinking and drugtaking, it’s not her teacher’s fault she’s not living up to her potential and instead is working front of house at a local hotel. She wasn’t abused, she’s not like the other girls, she was in a relationship and she chose to be there. That has to be her truth, because if she’s wrong, if she really lets herself examine the reality, then who is she? Just one of a series of victims, not special after all.

This is an unflinching look at grooming and control. It’s explicit, uncomfortable and all too real, a coming-of-age story for the Me Too generation. Written in the first person we stay with Vanessa as she is manipulated and seduced and raped, understanding her actions whilst repulsed and horrified by her situation. My Dark Vanessa is a difficult read thanks to the subject matter, whilst expertly plotted and beautifully written. Highly recommended.

Excellent account of a very difficult subject. The heroine is rounded, flawed, inconsistent and very real.

⭐️⭐️⭐️ 3 ok stars.

This book is well written and does a great job of describing and unpicking how clever paedophiles are in grooming their victims and ensuring they maintain secrecy.

It’s a difficult book to read but just because of the subject matter but also because it jumps around in time periods so much.

None of the characters are likeable which also makes it a tough read.

I can see all the 5 star reviews so I am in the minority but for me it was slow going.

My Dark Vanessa is a thought-provoking story, unsettling and uncomfortable at times. It took me a while to read and I was about to give up several times as it was quite slow and repetitive in places. The characters were well developed and realistic, but I found the structure with shifting time lines a little confusing. Overall, a reflective and memorable read but not one I'd recommend.
Many thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.

I can’t make my mind up about this book. I thought that it was a bit of an eye opener as to how people can be groomed and manipulated. I found some of the book hard to read. There is a lot to process. The characters all seem real and the events are believable.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

Don't be misled by the pretty YA-style cover - My Dark Vanessa is a nuanced and conflicting take on both the #MeToo movement and teacher/student sexual relationships (in the vein of Notes on a Scandal), which I'm certain will cause a stir when it is released in early 2020.

The early parts of the novel follow Vanessa at 15 years old - in 2000 - begins having an affair with her 45-year-old English teacher, Jacob Strane. We then fast forward to 2017, where we meet Vanessa aged 32, working in a dead-end job at a hotel and living a pretty miserable life. It may seem obvious why her life as ended up this way, but the way Russell handles Vanessa's interpretation of the relationship in the intervening years was, to me, very well done. Allegations start to appear, accusing Strane of sexual abuse with other students, and this causes Vanessa to reassess her entire life since aged 15.

Highly recommended - Russell is one to watch for sure.

A fantastic book. Dark, twisted and shocking to read. 5 stars,

My Dark Vanessa make for uncomfortable reading. The subjects tackled in this book are not easy to read or, no doubt, write about. Russell's writing however is fantastic and powerful - you want to scream at Jacob as he makes his moves on Vanessa.

I can't wait to see what Russell writes next. Until then, I'll be recommending this book to others, it is one of the best books I've read this year.

Thanks to NetGalley, Fourth Estate and Kate Elizabeth Russell for my ARC in exchange for an honest review.

If you are looking for a book to cheer you up, warm up your heart or make you feel good about the world, this book will do none of those things. My Dark Vanessa is the ultimate 5 star novel, but it is not a light read.

My Dark Vanessa could be a story of a 15 year old girl who fell in love with her teacher or it might be a story of a 15 year old who was groomed and abused by a manipulative predator of a teacher. In any case, it is a story of a troubled but vulnerable girl yearning for love who is taken advantage of.

This book is perfection not because of its timely subject matter or the complex characters or the engrossing writing, but first and foremost the masterful depiction of the psyche of a 15 year old, her journey and coping with the aftermath of the abuse that follows her into adulthood. I don't know Kate Elizabeth Russell and I don't know her life story but one thing is clear from this book. She writes about what she knows and she does it brilliantly.

"I'm going to ruin you."

This book definitely ruined me, yet it is my best read of 2019.


Many thanks to 4th Estate and William Collins for a review copy in exchange for an honest review.

A giant of a book. Should be required reading in schools / colleges. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC.

A few typos:

pg. 100: 7th line: what are you names (your)

pg. 112: 2nd para, last line: by ear burn. (my)

pg. 116: 3rd last line: so you and her and friends? (are)

pg. 120: 3rd line: I would never wear so something flimsy (something so flimsy)

134: 8th line: These sessions should not be me telling you want to do (what)

136: 1st line: how he cook. (to)

pg 173: 3rd para: I always let the them sink in.

pg. 175: I take a breath. “If tell you about something illegal, are you required to report it?” (If I tell you) She answers slowly, caught off-guard. “”If told me you murdered someone, I’d have to report it.” (If you told me)

pg176: It take the phone out of my bag (I take)

pg 176: last para: Only if slept with him, how it started, or how it ended. (If I slept)

pg 177: 4th para: One the walk home (On the walk home)

pg 182: 9th line: how he closely he studied me when he asked (how closely he)

pg 186: 1st oara, 5th line: every evening my parents watch hours CNN (hours of CNN)

pg 204: 2nd para, 3rd line: so the ice must have melting (been melting/ melted)

pg 204: 3rd para, last line: while jerked off on the other line. (while he jerked off)

pg 220: 1st para, 6th line: It could be been two (could have been)

pg. 225: 3rd para, last line: compared what he endured (compared to)

pg 228, 3rd last line: I wonder if he always this slow (if he was always)

pg 236: 1st para: letting her know I where she’s trying to lead me (know I know/ am aware)

pg 244: 2nd para, 3rd line: when my works is critiqued (work is)

pg 246: 1st para, 6th line: and grabs me the throat (grabs me by the)

pg 248: 3rd para: Over the summer the first thing he said when saw the apartment (when he saw)

pg 253: 3rd last line: This is was what being friends with a girl

pg 256: dogear (dog ear)

pg 276: last para: I don’t dare ask the ones I really answers to.

pg 278; That’s it started with me,

pg 279; “but before you no one wouldn’t have jumped to conclusions like this.

pg 287, last line: “so what exactly he did he do to you?”

pg 289: “I think you’ve made him to he something worse than he was.”

pg 291: it’s hard to fathom understand the damage it could have caused.

pg 291: and I walk through the through the sqaure.

pg 298: I wonder if Henry calls her that or if he use a nickname.

pg 299: “This uncomfortable for me,” he says.

pg 300: “Because, you know, what did to me wasn’t rape rape.”

pg 304: harassing

pg 309: “Is anything happening now to make send you those things?”

pg 310: When Henry says that, I see is a stark white sky and an exapnse of

pg 315: “I can’t you read it. And you never told me?”

pg 316: disappearing a grove of Douglas firs.

pg 317: I’m started ton get concerned over here.

pg 322: “I don’t what you mean.”

pg 329: For years I wanted nothing but more than his eyes on me

pg 330: “There’s a reason I haven’t allowed myself remember,”

pg 334; ‘Dad and I used to talk sometimes about the way that school did to you,“

pg 334: “You were a kid. you didn’t know what it would end up doing it you.”

* I received a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. Thanks to Netgalley and Fourth Estate books*

My Dark Vanessa - what an amazing debut from
Kate Elizabeth Russell!

15 year old Vanessa Wye falls in love and engages in a sexual relationship with her teacher, Jacob Strane. Fast forward to 32 year old Vanessa, she is now caught up in the whirlwind of claims that Strane has also sexually abused another girl and is asked to come forward about her experience.

The book flicks back and forth as Vanessa explores her dark desires with Strane at the young age of 15 and the consequences of this relationship throughout her life.

Russell’s writing sucks you in from the very first page and captivates you throughout. She tackles some tough subjects and doesn’t shy away from the details. Some parts are quite difficult to read but for some reason I just couldn’t stop.

I believe the hype that this is going to be one of the best books of next year.

Disturbing and challenging read about the relationship between a schoolgirl Vanessa Wye and her teacher Jacob Strand. They are still in contact years later when another student accuses him of under age sex.
I found this book ever difficult to read and had to read it over several days because it was so graphic in places.
In the world of #me too it has an important message as to how power can corrupt and what this type of relationship can do to someone.

Goodness this book held me tightly from the first sentence. The story of a young woman who comes under the influence of her English teacher, then is groomed by him until she believes herself specially selected for his sexual pleasure and who while knowing it is wrong, feels unable to break away. Even when she bears the brunt of social and scholarly rejection as the truth starts to emerge, she can’t break free of him. To see him as wrong would mean letting go of her own identity as his chosen love. Although at times she sees him as the older, balding, slightly overweight and sad person that he is, she can’t stop herself from helping him, reaching for him and lying for him.

Her loneliness and increasing isolation are hard to witness. We want to reach into the book and help her yet she doesn’t want to be helped. The descriptions of her abuse at the hands of her teacher are painful to read. She wants attention and love and he is very skilled at giving her a lot of what she wants and little by little, taking what he wants. As an adult she is imprisoned by some inner saboteur who keeps excusing her abuser even when other young women come forward to expose him. Happening at such a vital time in her life as she formed her identity, the abuse has seeped into her being and it is hard for her to recover her Self.

A very compelling and complex book – it may be hard to understand the psychology of abuse – black and white thinking do not help us here but this book has great depth that helps us get a new perspective on both.

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell is about a girl groomed and abused by her teacher. Some parts were well written but there were issues with repetitiveness, for example she seemed to bite the inside of her cheeks on almost every page.

Vanessa is not unusual; she is a fourteen-year-old girl who is a little insecure in her peer relationships, clearly someone who enjoys the intensity of a special friendship more than others and, because of this, sometimes she finds herself out on a limb at school. Whilst she doesn’t know it, this vulnerability makes her prime material for her English teacher, Jacob Strane. For the first half of this tale of abuse and exploitation, narrator Vanessa casts herself as willing and expectant because that’s what she needs to believe she is as she becomes more and more malleable through Strane’s insidious grooming. To read of the sexual activities is, naturally, repellent and the reader is particularly saddened when, very occasionally and very quietly, we hear Vanessa’s suggestion that maybe she doesn’t want to comply, that possibly she doesn’t find any of this enjoyable.
In the second half of the novel after Vanessa has been removed from school and Strane seems to have been vindicated of all accusations, Vanessa begins to travel down a path of self-destruction whilst still seeming to enjoy her occasional connection with Strane, despite that fact that he appears to be a strange object of desire for any young woman. She drinks too much, takes drugs, has a very difficult relationship with her parents, is promiscuous and works in a job well below her capabilities. It is through all this that Kate Elizabeth Russell underlines the long-term effect of childhood abuse. It is only at the end of the novel that Vanessa begins to take very small steps towards the truth – and who can blame her? In the final pages she muses: ‘…for the first time, I can imagine how it might feel not to be his, not to be him. To feel that maybe I could be good.’ She has never been anything other than ‘good’ at heart and yet Strane has fashioned her to become someone she abhors. This is a very difficult novel to read but I recommend it. It’s an important story about the exploitation of power and the lingering damage done through child sexual abuse, told with great sympathy for the still injured victim.
My thanks to NetGalley and 4th Estate for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair review.

I was kindly offered this book by NetGalley, and due to the praise it has received, I started it today.

I made it to page 5. A novel of obscene tragedy, monstrous child abuse, a molester's lies and lies to serve only his sick needs.

My apologies to the author, whose prose and characters are well-presented, but I simply cannot continue.

It makes me cry in pain and anger.

Thank you to 4th Estate and NetGalley for an early copy of My Dark Vanessa.

What to say about this book? I could not put it down and I absolutely loved it. It is hard to say you love a book with such a difficult subject matter but Russell's writing was so perfect for this narrative and made Vanessa a very believable character and the story really benefited from this.

My Dark Vanessa tells of a 15 year old girl who finds herself in a relationship with her 45 year old teacher. The story is told from just before Vanessa meets him until she is in her early 30s and it looks at everything in between.

I would highly recommend this book and I look forward to Russell's next work.

4.5/5

Please note, trigger warnings for sexual assault.