phenomenal. reading my dark vanessa feels like being swallowed by the sun; it is ferocious, epic, all-encompassing. it pulls flesh from bone and sears the meat until everything is fire. it is impeccable and it is devastating. it is unrelenting and confronting; it chafes at you until you are raw. if you choose to read it, go gently. be kind to yourself, and check the content warnings.

my dark vanessa follows vanessa from age fifteen to thirty-two, jumping back and forth to fill in the hazy timeline of vanessa’s abuse. the abuser is mr. strane, a teacher at vanessa’s boarding school who is almost triple vanessa’s age when they meet:

“I loved the math of it, three times my age, how easy it was to imagine three of me fitting inside him: one of me curled around his brain, another around his heart, the third turned to liquid and sliding through his veins.”

kate elizabeth russell expertly addresses the nuances and intricacies of grooming and of being a ‘victim’, allowing us insight into vanessa’s perspective without compromising our understanding of the abuse that she experiences. when we meet vanessa at age fifteen, she has just lost her only friend. vanessa at thirty-two is equally lonely. russell nestles us in the mind of a girl who feels isolated from her peers, and shows us how this loneliness can be co-opted by an abusive man with power over the girl, mutating these feelings of otherness into a cemented difference.

when you’re fifteen, it’s impossibly easy to feel as though nobody in the world has ever felt the way that you do, has never thought the way that you have. all it takes is for one adult to validate that feeling, assuring you that you’re right, and that they are the only person who can ever really see you, for your world to shrivel and shrink. for bony bars to sprout from the windows of your home, as you rattle about in the ribcage of the man who has eaten you whole.

“I'm airborne, freewheeling, the way I was the day he touched me for the first time, back when I soared across campus like a comet with a maple-red tail.”

one of the things i respect the most about russell’s text is how—through her deeply evocative prose, and piercing, probing imagery—she speaks to so many taboos and complexities in a way that is grounded in honesty and care. dissociation and disembodiment can be watered down in how they are discussed on a broader scale, but russell’s depiction of these experiences bowled me over. they were handled with tenderness, yet still conveyed the horror and brutality of being out of reach from yourself, brain spilling to sludge in some faraway universe. i was similarly floored by how exceptionally russell explored how strane’s abuse permeated vanessa’s thought patterns, fast-tracking her development in some ways and completely burying it in others.

“I see my body from above, ant-small, pale limbs floating on the lake, the water now past my ears. It laps at my cheeks, almost to my mouth, almost drowning Beneath me are monsters, leeches and eels, toothy fish, turtles with jaws strong enough to snap an ankle.”

russell’s text is rich beyond measure with discoveries. it is real in the same way that a car crash on a busy highway is real, but it is also real in the same way that a hand ran through grass is real. though it takes no shortcuts in getting there (that much is real too), it promises that in a world where extreme pain can exist, so can extreme wonders. so can dreams. so can a childhood, excavated from among the soil where it was fed to the worms far too soon. this suffering is real, so very real. but so is hope.

a star shoots down your throat, then lands in your belly. there, it explodes. there, you become it. my dark vanessa is that star. a fantastic, game-changing read.