A heart-wrenching-stomach-turning book to turn all your taste buds sour.
Dates Read: 24/10/2022 to 13/11/2022
Star rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Word to describe: Unsettling
Genre: Psychological Fiction
Trigger Warning: sexual abuse, minor-adult relationship, rape, forced penetration, forced sexual oral contact, sexual grooming and hebephilia, drug and alcohol abuse, self-harm, suicide, therapy and mental health discussions. My thorough list of trigger warnings above contains every possible indication of trauma or abuse that I believe is present in this book. Please note that this book may contain other trigger warnings that I have failed to mention. Do not read this book if any of the aforementioned will upset you or cause unnecessary harm to your mental state.
I had owned this book for a while since seeing it all over Instagram and TikTok, I had no idea what it was about but from the title and cover alone I was certainly intrigued. The book then sat on my e-reader completely forgotten about until this past month. My friend had read it earlier this year and gave me some indication of the traumatic scenes in this book. She had expressed that this book does not contain any trigger warnings at all - which I feel like this book deserves to give its readers that piece of mind and warn them of the graphic content to come. Nonetheless, even without the trigger warnings and my somewhat knowledge of the context of the story I pursued this book with caution and anticipation.
With each chapter that I read, I had to step back from the book and fully absorb the plot and what I had just read. There were a lot of instances in this book, in particular, the past relationship with 15-year-old Vanessa and adult Krane, where I had to mentally prepare myself for what was about to happen. This book is not for the faint-hearted. It is a very difficult read and will not leave me anytime soon. Every sexual contact between these two characters left my skin crawling. I had vivid images of this ugly frail old man preying on a beautiful girl - it was unsettling to read and to picture in my mind.
What makes this story harder to digest is knowing that the book is being presented from a young girl's point of view. You are not reading the story of a twisted man abusing a young girl (although that is central to the plot); you are reading about a young girl who became so obsessed with the book Lolita and believed an abusive relationship was true love. The book was gifted by a cunning and evil teacher who was set on making her his own Lolita - despite telling her she was too involved with the characters. These characters were alive in teenage Vanessa's mind, Krane and herself were the main characters of a love story where she envisioned them living happily ever after. The naivety and childlike romanticism about this horrific situation indicate how easy it was for Krane to manipulate Vanessa's young mind. She truly believed it was love. Even in the scenes where he forces himself on her and she wakes up to his mouth or hands penetrating her body, she dissociates from the moment, travelling elsewhere and telling herself it will be over soon and it is okay because he does love her and this is what she needs to do to gain love.
The anger and frustration that fueled my body during these scenes were unlike anything I had ever felt before. I had the utmost sympathy for teenage Vanessa, but her eventual acceptance and defence of her abuser as she grew had me feeling disgusted by her character. It was difficult to fully feel for Vanessa in the present-day point-of-view chapters. The internal moral compass is weighed down by these thoughts that Vanessa encouraged his behaviour with other girls as she got older, she was aware of his actions and his desire to hurt young girls, but because of her traumatic past, she could not separate the right and wrong of these situations. Vanessa was completely numb to her past and refused to believe it was anything but love.
To think that these well-developed characters, plot, and emotional damage were the result of a debut novel by Kate Elizabeth Russell is chilling. This story trapped me in a fogged glass of curiosity to finish the story and the eagerness to burn it to the ground. I cannot put into words how uncomfortable this book is to read, yet as uncomfortable as it is there is a reckless compulsion to continue the story to reach the end and see if the whole experience was worth it. But in the fashion of the rest of the book, even the conclusion works hard to tear my moral compass in two.
If you need me I will be buried under the covers listening to Disney music to drown out the plot of this book.
Comments