Half His Age

The highly anticipated, funny, sad, thrilling novel about sex, class, desire, and power – and the (often misguided) lengths we’ll go to to get what we want, from Jennette McCurdy, the three-million copy, Sunday Times bestselling author of I'm Glad My Mom Died.

Aston's Review

Half His Age.

It’s by Jennette McCurdy. And it’s a great book.

I’d been excited about McCurdy’s next project ever since I finished her 2020 memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died. And Half His Age doesn’t disappoint. The style of McCurdy’s memoir captured me completely, and it did so again in her debut novel.

Given the autobiographical nature the work, it feels unfair to describe this as a Lolita-esque novel; but reading it did leave me with an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. Half His Age has been out for a few weeks and has, understandably, received a mixed reaction: its treatment of a young female student’s relationship with a much older male teacher is sexually explicit, even at times gratuitously so. It’s also lightning fast, sarcastic and without a hint of sentimentality. It doesn’t hold your hand or tell you what to think. And while its plot is ultimately predictable, I think it works, because you’re committed to the ride no matter what!

PUBLISHER REVIEW

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.