*TUDOR^QUEEN* 's Reviews > My Dark Vanessa

I pegged this as an extremely disturbing and provocative read, and it certainly was. This is the story of a fifteen year old girl named Vanessa Wye who scores a scholarship to a prestigious boarding high school. While there she becomes a student of English professor Jacob Strane, who is almost thirty years older than her. In a delicately slow and creeping fashion, Strane lures Vanessa in with various methods of attentiveness, such as noticing her poetic talent, comparing the color of her hair to a maple leaf, and gifting her his personally notated copy of the scandalous book "Lolita".

The recounting of her ultimate deflowering was particularly riveting and horrifying, as he began the evening by asking step-by-step permissions, but in his carnal frenzy transitioned to asking after already taking.

This is a story of a very damaging relationship that forever colored and shaped Vanessa's life, altering the trajectory of any kind of normal, successful personal union or living up to her career potential. To all who seek to indict Jacob Strane, Vanessa defiantly insists that she wasn't abused, but that she was greatly loved.

There were one-sided political blurbs in a couple of areas of the book that continue to turn me off and only serve to isolate half of the reading population. However, the book was so engaging that I was able to shove off these annoyances and continue reading.

I work in a field where I see a lot of documentation on psychiatric cases, and many have suffered childhood sexual abuse. This is an important book that shows how this can happen and how it defines a person years later. Indeed, the spector of Jacob Strane loomed large in Vanessa's mind each day of her life.

Thank you to the publisher William Morrow / Harper Collins who provided an advance reader copy via Edelweiss.