toggles between two parallel timelines as it
meticulously tracks the eponymous narrator's affair with her New England boarding school English teacher, which began in 2000, when she was 15 and he was 42, and her painstaking, reluctant recognition 17 years later — in the midst of the #MeToo movement — of the devastation it has wrought on her life.is less subtle than Choi's and Walbert's novels — which are not among the dozens of works Russell lists on her website as influences.
Propelled by questions about whether, when, and how Vanessa will see the light and her teacher will finally be held accountable, Russell's novel offers a nuanced portrait of why some women refuse to view themselves as victims of abuse:"He loved me, he loved me," Vanessa insists. Plus, didn't she beg him for more?
'My Dark Vanessa' is ... a page-turner structured to amp up suspense, but it's also self-consciously bookish. Russell captures the insidious cunning with which Mr. Strane flatters, grooms, and seduces 15-year-old Vanessa, a lonely sophomore on full scholarship. He tells her she's special and compares her red hair to the fallen maple leaves on campus. He feeds her literature about redheads, including Sylvia Plath's"Ariel" and the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, another redhead from Maine.