TW/CW: Please note that this review contains discussion about the kidnapping and sexual assault of an eleven-year-old girl, as well as a broader examination of how our culture treats rape victims. Please be safe, and stop here if this content could be triggering for you.

In 1948, eleven-year-old Sally Horner was kidnapped by a convicted pedophile named Frank LaSalle. Sally would remain his captive for two years, traveling from her home in Camden, New Jersey, all the way to California. Her case would garner national attention. At the same time, Vladimir Nabokov was writing Lolita, and we know from his notes that he was aware of and following Horner’s story.

Sarah Weinman weaves these two stories together (one true crime, one literary history) in a way that highlights how, while Sally’s case is largely lost to time, Nabokov’s novel, which presents the reader with a deep POV of a pedophile, became an international sensation. More than that, and especially relevant in our present Me Too moment, is Weinman’s observation that we view the lives of the victim’s of sexual assault through the eyes of the men who abuse them. Nabokov pondered the obsession a grown man feels for a prepubescent girl. Weinman disregards that point of view entirely, and gives voice to a girl who was treated unjustly in her time and in ours.

She also subtly draws a line between Nabokov, Humbert Humbert, and Frank LaSalle–all men who pontificate and (in some cases) act on their desire for young girls for their own benefit. Humbert Humbert and LaSalle are undeniably sexual predators. Nabokov exploits his fictional Lolita, and in turn the real victims of child sexual crimes, for titillation. He makes pedophilia an intellectual endeavor.

I consume a good deal of true crime literature and podcasts, and so I was surprised by the fact that I knew nothing about Sally Horner’s story before I started this book. I could tell you, however, about reading Lolita while in college. I knew Humbert Humber’s story; I did not know Sally’s. I think that’s the point. I am always in search of feminist recounting of true crime stories–stories that focus on forgotten victims, that speak to the overlooked. I don’t read or listen to true crime that spends a lot of time in a killer or rapist’s mind because I don’t want to look there. For me, these are stories about the victims, often women and girls, not the abuser. In this way, The Real Lolita worked perfectly for me.

Weinman begins with the story of Sally’s kidnapping, giving us just enough background on Frank LaSalle to highlight how much our justice system failed Sally: prior to the kidnapping, LaSalle spent a total of fourteen months in prison for raping five girls. LaSalle’s voice, his motives, and his history aren’t the story here, and Weinman gives them the attention they deserve, which is to say, very little at all. Sally spent two years moving around the country with LaSalle, posing to the outside world as his daughter and enrolling in school. She would be asked then the same questions that rape victims are today: Why didn’t you tell someone? Why didn’t you run? Why didn’t you fight?

Weinman recounts all of this with careful objectivity and none of the jaw-clenching rage I felt at a thirteen-year-old being interrogated in this way.

When they were living in California, a neighbor suspected Sally was being abused, and the girl confided in her. The neighbor called the police, and the FBI then arrested LaSalle and Sally returned home to New Jersey. LaSalle was later sentenced to 35 years in prison. He died while incarcerated.

Interspersed with the story of Sally’s abduction and captivity, is the story of Vladimir Nabokov, a frustrated, fragile and volatile (although that volatility seems performative) teacher struggling with his novel The Kingdom by the Sea. Later titled Lolita, this famous work of literature chronicles the sexual obsession of a man, Humbert Humbert, with his twelve-year-old stepdaughter. Popular culture has painted him as a man possessed by a forbidden sexual mania, when in reality he is a child rapist.

As Weinman points out, there are too many similarities between the events in Lolita and the facts of Sally’s abduction to be coincidental. We also know that Nabokov took notes about Sally’s case. He was certainly aware of it, although he angrily denied it played a role in the creation of his novel. This wasn’t Sally’s story–it was his. To me, this is a violation as well.

It is through the comparison of these two events–one literary, one true crime–that Weinman highlights the injustice done to Sally Horner, and to women and girls who are the victims of rape. Lolita is still viewed as a novel of titillation and forbidden desire. It is Humbert Humbert’s story and it is (in my opinion) lacking in kindness for Lolita herself, Dolores Haze. Her voice comes to us only through her abuser.

Weinman writes:

Vladimir Nabokov set out to create an archetype. But the real little girls who fit this idea of the mythical nymphet end up getting lost in the need for artistic license. The abuse that Sally Horner, and other girls like her, endured, should not be subsumed by dazzling prose, no matter how brilliant.

That passage is so vitally important to the understanding of this book. This isn’t just a story about how a crime influences the writing of a novel. This is the story about how the rape of a child becomes sensationalized, turned into a book, into movies, turns the word “Lolita” into slang for a sexually attractive teenager. Sally Horner’s story should be a story of a young girl’s resilience, but instead Nabokov commandeered it to make it about men and their forbidden desires.

As a reader, I am pretty fucking sick of the bad (even criminal) behavior of men being written off as a inherent in their nature. Weinman strips Humbert Humbert, Nabokov, and LaSalle of this excuse, and instead focuses on Sally and how the justice system and the media failed her. As a true crime reader this is far, far more satisfying than a lot of the lurid tales of female corpses that fill the genre.

Until now, Sally Horner’s story has been told by an unsympathetic media. Through careful research, Weinman presents a compassionate view of a young woman whose trauma was simultaneously sensationalized and dismissed. As I said earlier, LaSalle had previously raped five girls and spent a grand total of fourteen months in prison for it. His wife divorced him on the grounds of infidelity, which is astonishing as it implies that both parties were consenting. His sexual attraction to girls was treated as the foible of a grown man, not as predation.

While the subject matter is sometimes enraging, it’s never sensational. Weinman doesn’t spend much time discussing what happened to Sally while in captivity because she doesn’t need to. We know what happened. She isn’t skimming over the facts for the sake of delicacy; those details aren’t necessary. The word rape appears infrequently in this book, and the only detail we are given is that near the end of captivity, LaSalle had stopped sexual assaulting Sally. Sally told the police that she thought this was because she had asked him to stop; it’s possible that, at thirteen, she had simply aged out of his preference.

Meanwhile the media was relentlessly cruel to her mother, Ella, blaming her for Sally’s abduction. Ella had allowed Sally to go with LaSalle, believing him to be the father of Sally’s friend. Sally’s return home was also bleak; she endured the whispers of her peers, no longer a “good girl” despite the fact that she was blameless. Like many women, she was treated as though she had been corrupted by her assault, as if she were in some way complicit.

The most heartbreaking passage in this book was, for me, when Sally’s mother told the media:

“Whatever she has done, I can forgive her for it. If I can just have her back again.”

Both women are held to account for Sally’s kidnapping in a way her kidnapper isn’t. It’s mind-boggling and also disturbingly familiar.

Weinman does her best to give Sally a voice and a life outside her two years as a captive. She gives us Sally in the context of her family, as a younger daughter and latch-key child who was excited when she learned, after her kidnapping, that she was an aunt. She gives us Sally after her ordeal, struggling to be a normal teenager, making friends, developing crushes. She worked at her sister’s greenhouse. She went to the beach with her friends. She never spoke about what happened to her–her family wouldn’t allow it.

Meanwhile in a fit of artistic pique, Nabokov was threatening to burn his manuscript for  Lolita, all while a real “Lolita” moved on with her life, a survivor.

Sally Horner died in a car accident at fifteen. She never got to tell her story, assuming she would want to. Nabokov used her as the inspiration for a novel about an abuser. Weinman, carefully and compassionately, brings Sally into the light, a real Lolita whose story is infinitely more important than the one we’ve been told. True crime is a genre that often commodifies the body of women. The Real Lolita turns all of that on its head and proves that the genre is capable of compassionate, intelligent, feminist perspectives on crimes against women.