A very powerful and impactful story, My Dark Vanessa tells the story of Vanessa Wye across two timelines: the present and the past as she deals with the trauma of being groomed and being approached by a journalist asking her to come forward after another student accuses the same teacher of abuse.

My Dark Vanessa isn't necessarily about the grooming and abuse of Vanessa and how this impacted her life, it's more about the failure of different systems, the failure of individuals and collectives to fight, to report what they see. The impact on culture and social media to shut the voices down, or call the simplest things an overreaction.

Vanessa, at times, was frustrating in terms of her naivety, but I have to remember that at the time when she was being groomed she was only fifteen. Still so impressionable, Strane was, as described later on in the novel, a predator. He exploited and manipulated Vanessa's vulnerabilities and ingrained himself so perfectly that he had exactly what he wanted, a girl who would never turn him over. You have to wonder at the failure of academic systems, how two separate teachers who knew Vanessa really well, and suspected, didn't report Strane, or stand up for Vanessa when rumours started. The fact that it took another student. Why wasn't it the adults who had the safeguarding duty to report their suspicions?

It took me three weeks to read this, quite a stretch for me, but I think thats because of the heavy topic it was depicting.