Vanessa Wye

Because of the split-focused first-person narration that moves across 15 years, Vanessa Wye emerges as a contested character: she cannot entirely decide whether, in her relationship with Jacob Strane, she was an innocent child abused by a predatory pedophile or a young woman empowered to decide her own choices. Her last name in fact is a play on that ambiguity, the aching and open question Why. Conflict defines her character. Any definition of her character inevitably involves a “but also.” She is a victim of Strane but also his willing accomplice. She is used by a calculating adult but she understands completely every move she makes. She is Strane’s great passion but also his most despicable creation. “It’s wrong to call me a victim and nothing more” (110), she says years after Browick. She moves back and forth between and among the perceptions of herself. She is...