"Lucid and nuanced . . . [Consent] will speak to trauma survivors everywhere." - Los Angeles Review of Books
"Consent is that elegantly laid trap, a memoir that asks sharp questions about desire, literature, and a culture that fetishizes female youth and inexperience over female art. " - The Paris Review
"Consent [is] rapier-sharp, written with restraint, elegance and brevity." - The Times (London)
"[Consent] has something steely in its heart, and it departs from the typical American memoir of childhood abuse in exhilarating ways." - Slate
"Consent is a Molotov
cocktail, flung at the face of the French establishment, a work of dazzling, highly controlled fury...By every conceivable metric, her book is a triumph." -
New York Times"A piercing memoir about the sexually abusive relationship she endured at age 14 with a 50-year-old writer. . . . This chilling account will linger with readers long after the last page is turned.
" -
Publishers Weekly"A fierce account from a woman hoping to wrest her story back. Recommended Reading." -
Library Journal"Springora's lucid account is a commanding discussion of sexual abuse and victimization, and a powerful act of reclamation." -
Booklist"A chilling story of child abuse and the sophisticated Parisians who looked the other way...[Springora] is an elegant and perceptive writer." -
Kirkus Reviews"One of the belated truths that emerges from [
Consent] is that Springora is a writer. . . . Her sentences gleam like metal; each chapter snaps shut with the clean brutality of a latch." -
The New Yorker"In elegant, focused prose, fluidly translated by Natasha Lehrer...With admirable restraint - another author might have been tempted to veer off into disquisitions on De Sade, Balthus, or Nabokov - Springora describes how Matzneff expertly manipulated her into believing she had as much agency and power as he did." -
The Guardian"Springora's style is incisive and she keeps readers hooked with short chapters depicting a post-1968 libertarian establishment that lets her down[.]" -
The Financial Times"Even if he is acquitted, Springora has managed to exact some revenge by capturing G, and all of his terrible behavior, forever in these erudite, incriminating pages." -
New York Journal of Books"[
Consent] is really about power; who we give it to, and where it should be curtailed. It is also about correcting an imbalance." -
Sunday Times (London)"By coldly dismantling the mechanism, the cogs and the collusions, Vanessa Springora transcends the personal framework and questions society as a whole. In this, Consent is a book that counts, far beyond testimony." -
Nicole Grudlinger
"The story delivered is reminiscent of that of a pact with the devil and the reference to fairy tales (
Bluebeard in particular) highlights the importance of the theme of sexual predator in literature, including children's literature. Love must be there in wonder; in the case of the sexual predator, the stupor is not that of joy but that of Evil. To write it is to exorcise it, in the strong sense; to receive this testimony is to accompany this disenchantment and to get out of the state of torpor in which conformism, indifference or complacency always threaten to plunge us." -
Elodie Pinel, La Revue Études"[Springora] is not writing this memoir solely for herself; she's writing it as a plea to stop normalizing the type of toxic masculinity that is often excused because the male is a 'great artist.'...
Consent is powerful and tragic, and one of the most important testimonies on this subject ever written." -
World Literature Today
