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4.2 AVERAGE
4.2 AVERAGE
“Slowly guided into the fire—why is everyone so scared to admit how good that can feel? To be groomed is to be loved and handled like a precious, delicate thing.”
(Russel, 2020)
How to explain the experience of reading something that gets to the guts of you with a knife and begs you to keep still all at once? The experience of watching an animal eat another animal, begging yourself to look away but knowing it’s already done. The experience of watching a man fan the flames of that ember we all have in us – the one that tells us we’re special, we aren’t like other people. We’re apart from them, maybe even above them. And yes, you’re right, maybe we are smarter, grown up in the way other people can’t see but you… you can see it. Only you can see it.
My Perfect Vanessa is a story about victimhood, about what it looks like to be a victim, and what it looks like when you don’t see yourself as a victim, don’t want to see yourself as a victim. If Vanessa admits to herself that she is a victim of her charismatic and manipulative teacher, Mr Jacob Strane, then she will be forced to let go of the lens through which she views her childhood as a love story, and see it finally for what it was. Abuse.
The story begins in the present, in 2017, where allegations against Strane are being brought back into public awareness, and we see even here a glimpse of the hold that he has on Vanessa. As the story flits between the present and the past, we are forced to pair in our minds the two parts of Vanessa – the young girl whose strings are slowly being pulled, and the traumatised woman who is unable to finally cut them from her.
An idea I found haunting is that abusers other you for the purpose of keeping you. All young girls yearn to be powerful, to be special, to be meaningful, and Strane uses these desires to catch Vanessa. If he moves slowly enough to shift her perception of others, of reality, of herself, then she can believe that what they have is love. She can believe that she is not being subjected to sexual and emotional abuse, she is being treated as a ‘precious, delicate thing’.
While Vanessa’s relationship with Strane was the most realized one in the book, I also enjoyed her relationship with her mother, the way you can resent someone for not protecting you, even when you told them not to in the first place. I felt that the characters and relationships in the book outside of Strane were never fully developed for me, but I can also see how this added to the experience. This is what an abuser does. To groom a little girl you must lead her away from any relationships that will tell her she is in danger, that she is not special, that she’s just a little girl. The fact that Vanessa has been poisoned into believing herself different and incompatible with the world makes the story all the more haunting.
This was a hard read for me, and I would recommend anyone intending to read it to ask themselves if they are ready for the themes that the novel centres on, and if they are ready to feel those themes so intimately. While this story is a confronting one, I feel that it is an important one – to tell the story of Lolita, of so many girls manipulated by men, but from the point of view of the girls this time. To highlight how hard and raw it is to find yourself when someone has tried to peel parts of you away. To ask ourselves how we allow this to happen.
I hope that we can allow stories like this to stay as they are, as honest and putrid depictions of the pain we know is out there, rather than as a scrapbook ready to be cut up into quotes of forbidden love and consuming of the self. I hope that it is allowed to be itself, not as coquette, girlcore, waifspo, femcel, dark academia.
Perhaps we can look at pain, at the pain of girls, and see it for its strange and undefinable self, rather than packaging it into words and pictures that make it beautiful, that make it bearable.
(Russel, 2020)
How to explain the experience of reading something that gets to the guts of you with a knife and begs you to keep still all at once? The experience of watching an animal eat another animal, begging yourself to look away but knowing it’s already done. The experience of watching a man fan the flames of that ember we all have in us – the one that tells us we’re special, we aren’t like other people. We’re apart from them, maybe even above them. And yes, you’re right, maybe we are smarter, grown up in the way other people can’t see but you… you can see it. Only you can see it.
My Perfect Vanessa is a story about victimhood, about what it looks like to be a victim, and what it looks like when you don’t see yourself as a victim, don’t want to see yourself as a victim. If Vanessa admits to herself that she is a victim of her charismatic and manipulative teacher, Mr Jacob Strane, then she will be forced to let go of the lens through which she views her childhood as a love story, and see it finally for what it was. Abuse.
The story begins in the present, in 2017, where allegations against Strane are being brought back into public awareness, and we see even here a glimpse of the hold that he has on Vanessa. As the story flits between the present and the past, we are forced to pair in our minds the two parts of Vanessa – the young girl whose strings are slowly being pulled, and the traumatised woman who is unable to finally cut them from her.
An idea I found haunting is that abusers other you for the purpose of keeping you. All young girls yearn to be powerful, to be special, to be meaningful, and Strane uses these desires to catch Vanessa. If he moves slowly enough to shift her perception of others, of reality, of herself, then she can believe that what they have is love. She can believe that she is not being subjected to sexual and emotional abuse, she is being treated as a ‘precious, delicate thing’.
While Vanessa’s relationship with Strane was the most realized one in the book, I also enjoyed her relationship with her mother, the way you can resent someone for not protecting you, even when you told them not to in the first place. I felt that the characters and relationships in the book outside of Strane were never fully developed for me, but I can also see how this added to the experience. This is what an abuser does. To groom a little girl you must lead her away from any relationships that will tell her she is in danger, that she is not special, that she’s just a little girl. The fact that Vanessa has been poisoned into believing herself different and incompatible with the world makes the story all the more haunting.
This was a hard read for me, and I would recommend anyone intending to read it to ask themselves if they are ready for the themes that the novel centres on, and if they are ready to feel those themes so intimately. While this story is a confronting one, I feel that it is an important one – to tell the story of Lolita, of so many girls manipulated by men, but from the point of view of the girls this time. To highlight how hard and raw it is to find yourself when someone has tried to peel parts of you away. To ask ourselves how we allow this to happen.
I hope that we can allow stories like this to stay as they are, as honest and putrid depictions of the pain we know is out there, rather than as a scrapbook ready to be cut up into quotes of forbidden love and consuming of the self. I hope that it is allowed to be itself, not as coquette
dark
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
challenging
dark
emotional
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This book will make you feel icky and uncomfortable. It will also make you think long after you are done reading it is a work of class -A gaslighting, threats, grooming and how predators manipulate the narrative. The book read like a memoir though it’s fiction it has a very believable dou timeline. The book describes how one can be permanently marked by the abuse. Well worth reading!
dark
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This was very therapeutic for me.
Vanessa was not ready to come to terms with her abuse, how traumatizing it is as a victim to come forward because of course woman should support woman right, if you have been abused and somebody else you know has been in contact with that person you’re putting other women in danger and so, but that completely minimizes how personal and traumatizing it really is to come forward.
Vanessa was not ready to come to terms with her abuse, how traumatizing it is as a victim to come forward because of course woman should support woman right, if you have been abused and somebody else you know has been in contact with that person you’re putting other women in danger and so, but that completely minimizes how personal and traumatizing it really is to come forward.
a difficult beautifully written read about what you need to believe to get through it all
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes