INTERNATIONAL BOOKS
Fiction
My Dark Vanessa
Kate Elizabeth Russell (HarperCollins, $38)
When 15-year-old Vanessa decides she wants to go to Browick, a prestigious boarding school in Maine, she makes an impassioned presentation to her hard-working parents as to why she should attend. And when she wins a scholarship, they let her go. But at Browick, her English teacher grooms her for something other than academic success, a process he initiates by lending books, from Sylvia Plath to , and Vanessa, a lonely student who doesn’t quite fit in, embarks on what she interprets as the great love of her life. Seventeen years later, in a world rocked by waves of #MeToo, that same English teacher is accused of sexual abuse by another student and Vanessa is forced to confront the excruciating knowledge that her great love was actually a predator; her adolescent perspective
