The Controversial Novel That Immerses Readers in Teen Abuse

The story of an abusive relationship between a teacher and his pupil is intelligent, brave and painful to read.In Kate Elizabeth Russell’s powerful debut novel, Vanessa Wyes is 15 when she becomes involved with a teacher at her Maine boarding school. At 42, Jacob Strane is neither young nor attractive, but Vanessa is only too willing to be pulled into what she believes is first love. Russell cleverly lures us inside the labyrinth of the teenage mind – hot with hormonal turmoil, pushing boundaries, craving admiration, breaking rules and obsessing about sex. Vanessa has never kissed a boy, but she welcomes the advances of her English teacher. Strane begins by touching her knee under the desk in class, progresses to furtive kisses and then they go to bed. “I’m going to ruin you,” he says, as if tormented. He praises her writing and quotes Nabokov – “My Dark Vanessa” comes from Pale Fire. He also gives her Lolita, which becomes such an obsession that she later confuses her own memories with those of “Lo and Humbert”.
The writing is dark, shocking, occasionally nauseating and will rightly be labelled “brave”. Actually, you have to be pretty brave to read it. It is hard to witness the repeated rape of a girl who is filled with longing and desire for a monstrous man. Strane (he is never Jacob) makes Vanessa complicit: calling her “the same as me. Separate from others, craving dark things”. Vanessa is a classic victim who protects her abuser, but even as a 15-year-old, she recognises her perverse potency as an illegal object of desire. “Jailbait means having the power to turn a man into a criminal with just one touch,” she writes in a notebook.

This fast-paced, intelligent novel encapsulates the current zeitgeist in which earlier sexual mores are being re-evaluated and clearer boundaries laid down. It also shows how social media play a vital role in uniting survivors and advocating justice