Book info

• Title Half His Age
• Author Jennette McCurdy
• Year 2026
• Genre Contemporary

Waldo is ravenous. Horny. Blunt. Naive. Wise. Impulsive. Lonely. Angry. Hurting. Endlessly wanting. And the thing she wants most of all? Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher. Mr Korgy, with the wife and the kid and the mortgage and the bills, with the dead dreams and the atrophied looks and the growing paunch. She doesn’t know why she wants him. Is it his passion? His life experience? The fact that he knows books and films that she doesn’t? Or are they actually kindred spirits, sharing the same filter with which they each take in the world around them? Or, perhaps, it’s just enough that he sees her when no one else does. Startlingly perceptive, mordantly funny, and keenly poignant, Half His Age is an incisive study of a yearning seventeen-year-old who disregards all obstacles in her effort to be seen, to be desired and to be loved.

Thoughts

McCurdy is a great writer, her memoir made that very clear, and this is a very readable debut novel. But there’s something odd about it. It’s meant to be disturbing and unsettling, that’s fine. It’s vulgar and obsessed with sex and occasionally worryingly relatable, that’s fine too. But it’s missing anything that brings you in to the story, makes you care about the characters, makes you invest in the outcome of this story. We don’t know why we’ve got into this situation, and we don’t really know where we are at the end either. I wanted to like this more than I did, but I also think there’s a lot more to tell here that we’re just not given access to.

Rating: 3 / 5