PositiveLos Angeles Review of Books[A] lucid and nuanced nonfiction account of the emotional and societal ramifications of the sexual relationship Springora had, some 35 years ago, with celebrated writer Gabriel Matzneff, when he was 50 and she was 14 — a relationship that isolated her from her peers and left her psychologically scarred into her adult years ... Consent does not reveal much about Matzneff that was not already known. Indeed, its story is precisely about how much was known that was considered a private matter rather than a societal problem ... Springora’s measured and persuasive account recreates the tone of her young self’s emotional ambivalence, even while her present-day narrator condemns years of collective inertia in tackling the problem of child sexual abuse ... Strikingly, Springora’s work, with its nuanced ambivalence, shows the value she continues to place in literature, which gives experience a mode of expression in which every voice has its place and where moral judgment is not always the ultimate arbiter.
