Both books are dark and twisty and feature very flawed and damaged young women, There the similarity ends.
Firstly is The Recovery of Rose Gold by Stephanie Wrobels
Here are my thoughts:
Dark and twisty
This is a deliciously dark and twisty psychological tale with not one but 2 devilishly complex and flawed female leads.
Rose Gold, who is now an adult, but when she was a child she was treated appallingly by her Mom Patty, who has served time for attempting to poison her only child. Although what she really seems to have done is poisoned her mind. For one woman is as bad as the other and you never quite know who is telling the absolute truth... who to have a little sympathy for... who is the most unreliable narrator... who is the sickest in the head!
It would seem that having served her time Patty is desperate to make amends with her daughter, denying the abuse she is accused of and insisting everything she has ever done was for the love of her daughter
Will she forgive and forget?
Rose Gold would appear to be ready to forgive and forget, but it's probably not as easy as that. She is alone, a single parent with a baby boy. How can she ever trust Patty around him?
A devilish twist
OMG this is one warped and sick, fiendishly twisty and utterly compelling read. I thoroughly enjoyed it and it had a devilish twist I can't believe I didn't see coming.
The Blurb
Rose Gold Watts believed she was sick for eighteen years. She thought she needed the feeding tube, the surgeries, the wheelchair . . .
Turns out her mum, Patty, is a really good liar.
After five years in prison Patty Watts is finally free. All she wants is to put old grievances behind her, reconcile with her daughter and care for her new infant grandson. When Rose Gold agrees to have Patty move in, it seems their relationship is truly on the mend.
But Rose Gold knows her mother. Patty won't rest until she has her daughter back under her thumb. Which is a smidge inconvenient because Rose Gold wants to be free of Patty. Forever.
Only one Watts will get what she wants.
Will it be Patty or Rose Gold?
Mother, or daughter?
My Second read is
My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell
Damaged or disturbed?
Not sure exactly how I felt about this book about another flawed and damaged young woman, well written and gripping. Compelling reading, but I didn't find it so much shocking as just rather tragic and sad.
The story of a precocious teenage girl who seduces her middle aged teacher. Well that's how she sees it.
It's a teenage crush taken to obsession but who is obsessed with who? It jumps about in time quite a bit which I found a little confusing.
Vanessa was a schoolgirl of 15 when she began a long lasting affair with her teacher. She is an adult now still in touch with Jacob Strane, the teacher who everyone insists abused her, whilst she continues to view it as the love affair of her life.
Love? Or dark obsession?
It has certainly made a lasting impression on her, so much that she still keeps in touch with her lover and even when he is accused of similar acts that people have said he committed against her, she defends him vehemently.
The one thing which sustains her, even now she is a lonely grown woman who drinks too much, is her own conviction of her own power, the knowledge that she instigated everything, she used her attractiveness, her wiles, her seductiveness to woo him. She revels in the feeling that she is a bad girl and she always will be.
She sees herself as some kind of femme-fatale with this power over men, she harbours dark desires, she is Lolita, she is different, she is special .... (the reality is she is flawed and she is broken)
She is unable to sustain relationships because everything she does and everyone she grows close to pales in comparison with the intensity of feelings aroused by her illicit affair with this older man.
But undoubtedly he was culpable, he was the adult he should have known better and he should never, ever have given in to the temptation of taking this pretty young girl into his bed.
Having lasting repercussions this is one affair which was never going to end well for anyone involved.
Dark, moving and compulsive reading.
The Blurb
Exploring the psychological dynamics of the relationship between a precocious yet naïve teenage girl and her magnetic and manipulative teacher, a brilliant, all-consuming read that marks the explosive debut of an extraordinary new writer.
2000. Bright, ambitious, and yearning for adulthood, fifteen-year-old Vanessa Wye becomes entangled in an affair with Jacob Strane, her magnetic and guileful forty-two-year-old English teacher.
2017. Amid the rising wave of allegations against powerful men, a reckoning is coming due. Strane has been accused of sexual abuse by a former student, who reaches out to Vanessa, and now Vanessa suddenly finds herself facing an impossible choice: remain silent, firm in the belief that her teenage self willingly engaged in this relationship, or redefine herself and the events of her past. But how can Vanessa reject her first love, the man who fundamentally transformed her and has been a persistent presence in her life? Is it possible that the man she loved as a teenager—and who professed to worship only her—may be far different from what she has always believed?
Alternating between Vanessa’s present and her past, My Dark Vanessa juxtaposes memory and trauma with the breathless excitement of a teenage girl discovering the power her own body can wield. Thought-provoking and impossible to put down, this is a masterful portrayal of troubled adolescence and its repercussions that raises vital questions about agency, consent, complicity, and victimhood. Written with the haunting intimacy of The Girls and the creeping intensity of Room, My Dark Vanessa is an era-defining novel that brilliantly captures and reflects the shifting cultural mores transforming our relationships and society itself.
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