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notesofacrocodile's Reviews (256)
reading this novel was deeply painful, to say the least. painful and frustrating. there is nothing that really rattles a reader to their bone as a protagonist such as vanessa, who kept being dragged back into the increasingly tangled web of predatory behaviour and the malicious manipulation of her pedophile teacher. her character is not an easy one to love. but the point of her character is not to be liked either; it is to understand and empathize. to acknowledge that there is still a long way to go for people to be educated on what abuse is, and for schools and other educational institutions to put in place better policies aimed at stopping such cases from happening or to at least be able to appropriately protect the child victims.
with each page, we fall into the progressively tightening spiral of disastrous life choices and depression that vanessa is shoved head on into, with prose that successfully rises up to the challenge of narrating such a difficult and complicated story.
with each page, we fall into the progressively tightening spiral of disastrous life choices and depression that vanessa is shoved head on into, with prose that successfully rises up to the challenge of narrating such a difficult and complicated story.
oscar wilde was really living it up in the 1890s dropping bangers like “all women become like their mothers. that is their tragedy. no man does, and that is his.”
// “Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.
And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time."
There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.”
And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time."
There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.”
i demand reparations from the adoring millions who promised potential readers that this book would change lives