I've just finished book number 4 "My Dark Vanessa" a disturbing but excellent debut novel from Kate Elizabeth Russell on the subject of a teacher/pupil relationship where coercion and consent are both central. I was gripped by the book, set in a boarding school in Vermont. Pupil, Vanessa, aged 15, a lonely girl. At the start of the novel, we find her just off loaded by her best friend in favour of a boy classmate, and suffering from transitional depression so common in the in between years of leaving childhood and becoming an adult. She develops an intense relationship with her English teacher, to whom she is a star pupil, he is a man of 42. The narrative is told from her perspective as a troubled teenager and in retrospect as an unhappy adult who never reaches her full potential, blighted by her experiences of the affair with the teacher, although she was very much complicit in that from the outset. She continues with an on off relationship with him as she grows up and is never able to move on from what becomes a defining time in her life, particularly as at a later stage he is accused of indiscretions with other pupils. To my surprise on reading the Sunday Times magazine at the week-end there was an interview with a French female writer who discussed how she was groomed from the age of 13 by an eminent older writer who her mother knew, he was in his 50s at the time and even now makes no bones about the fact that he had sexual relationships with children. A lot of parallels with this book and very coincidently she was also called Vanessa. The name of the title of the book is taken from a Nabokov novel, not Lolita, although that is often referenced throughout.
My 5th book is a spy thriller The Artemis File, recommended on MN, as was this one I've just read.
