When this was listed as one of the Big Books of 2020 last winter, I decided to give it a shot. And I'm not entirely sad I did? But I'm also not sure whether it was worth it.
The premise of this book is examining the sexual relationship that Vanessa had with her high school teacher Jacob Strane when she was 15 and he was 43. The narrative goes back and forth between 2000, when their relationship began, and 2017, when Strane is accused by other high school students of abuse during the #metoo movement (which is referenced but never directly named). Vanessa's narrative voice is understandably unreliable when it's the 15 year old POV: she believes this to be a romance, rather than abuse, and the reader sees his manipulation and gaslighting almost too clearly. But 32-year-old Vanessa is also unable to see the relationship the way the reader is meant to. There is such a grating dissonance between her interpretation of events (a romance), and what they actually were (statutory rape and abuse of power, among other things) that it's hard to know how to respond as a reader.
It's also a remarkably unsubtle book. There are observations and critical critiques worth making related to all of this: Vanessa came of age when Britney Spears and internet countdown clocks to various teenage girls turning 18 were common, and the conception of an underage girl actually having the power and control over grown men was presented as a version of feminism. And the biggest political scandal of the '90s concerned the most powerful man in the U.S. being brought down and made helpless by an intern, who wielded even more power than he did. But the book requires Vanessa to barely be a person in her own right in order to make these observations. She is so utterly alone during her entire experience, and is betrayed by every possible source of support (with the exception of her therapist she started seeing six months before the book began), and even the version of #metoo that exists in this book is unable to help her, because she's the wrong kind of victim: the victim who convinced herself she wanted it. But that's not actually very uncommon at all, especially in the specific scenario of being groomed by a man like Strane. It ends up reading like an odd "I'm not like those other [abused] girls" story, and I can't get past wondering what the point of the narrative is meant to be. Is the revelation supposed to be that victims of abuse often convince themselves that it was actually love? I kept waiting for this book to land for me, and it never did.
Grade: C
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