I really did not enjoy this book at all. I agree the subject matter is important but I didn't find this particular telling of the subject matter was effective, in my own view and opinion. Just because the subject is important doesn’t make all tellings of it necessarily well done or important in their own right.

The writing felt as if the author was trying too hard to be profound....all the time. For example, Vanessa meets up with someone for a very difficult and potentially explosive talk about the past...and the building she arranges the meeting in and walks through so fleetingly is described to such an extent it felt like the building itself had some important part to play in the story...the other people within the building are apparently ‘grinning’ as they work away on laptops...it felt very unrealistic. Maybe too much creative writing and not enough impactful clever writing.
The story itself was unrelentingly drear. It is a very traumatic story but the overwhelming emotion I felt was one of weary dreariness. The characters felt one sided, there was no nuance or depth in the depiction of anyone in the book. Each person seemed very much like a character in a teenager movie. The ‘housemother’ at the school, Vanessa’s mother, the other girls at the school, the homosexual goth, everyone felt flat and two dimensional.
Also I felt that the sex scenes described in this book, while meant to be shocking, could have been written so much better with less graphic detail. In fact I think this could have been more impactful. As it was I almost felt it was written to sensationalise and view this from outside.... like buying a tabloid newspaper for all the gossipy details. This could be described as unputdownable but it felt just voyeuristic to me. I am far from a prude here, I just felt this could have been done better .
I realised about two thirds of the way in how this was going to end and that too was a shame because it would have been interesting to see the alternative unfold in all that complexity...but maybe that would have been a different story altogether. I did get that it was commenting on the media depiction of stories as a further violation in some cases...and that outing events like these isn’t the only way to process personal experiences, at least that there are different ways of coming to terms internally with trauma....but even that could have been considered more carefully...As it was it became a slow and rather boring trudge.
Sorry if you thought the book was good, reading is subjective, but this didn’t work for me at all. In fact I feel a bit violated by it. It was just horrible