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Spoilers Ahead

This book might leave you feeling like you’re covered in a sticky, gross biofilm after reading. At least that’s how it was for me.

Half His Age is about a seventeen-year-old girl Waldo who becomes attracted to her Creative Writing teacher, Mr. Korgy. She leads a depressing life filled with frozen TV dinners, online shopping sprees for things she can’t really afford and doesn’t actually want, and flings with guys she doesn’t like. She and Mr. Korgy eventually start something of a relationship, which leads to her feeling fulfilled in ways she hasn’t experienced before—but only for a time. Things start to collapse as Mr. Korgy wrestles with his guilt over cheating on his wife and not being able to give Waldo a life that she deserves, while Waldo becomes increasingly filled with resentment over playing the mistress role and being treated like a dirty secret.

Jennette McCurdy herself reads the audiobook version. Her fast-paced cadence complements and emphasizes the book’s themes of rapid consumerism and Waldo’s frantic beauty routines to make herself “perfect” for Mr. Korgy, especially when we get toward the end of the story and Jennette’s speech becomes slower and more tired-sounding as the relationship begins fizzling out. Personally, though, I’m not a fan of the fast talking. It’s beyond agitating. Sometimes she speaks so fast that words run together and I have to replay to understand what’s being said.

Throughout the book, Waldo is aware of her situation and how fucked up it is, but she’s still unable to want or seek better for herself. She doesn’t care that it’s fucked up, as shown by her and Mr. Korgy’s meeting in the coffee shop, because it gives her pleasure, even if she needs an increasing amount of hits just to feel alive. She’s a teenage girl who’s being groomed and manipulated by an older man, so we can’t exactly expect her to have that confidence and strength of mind to tell him to just go fuck himself. He serves as a welcome distraction from the mess of her life. The story’s B-plot is the whole stereotypical bit of the lowkey neglectful mom who’s desperate for any man to love her and an absent father, and of course this type of parentage dictates Waldo’s feelings about herself and her relationships with boys and men. Low self-esteem and accepting what you think you deserve and all that. I’ve seen this family dynamic in various types of media, and I just feel like none of them have yet to say anything new or profound.

(If you actually like this particular flavor of familial dysfunction, Motherthing has the same type of dynamic, though the protagonist of this novel is an adult married woman, and there’s a mentally ill mother-in-law in the mix.)

The part where Waldo’s mother begins group therapy and acts as if she’ll turn her life around is almost too on the nose, because it coincides with Waldo’s realizations that maybe she doesn’t like Mr. Korgy as much anymore; his flaws have become a lot more obvious to her now that he’s left his wife and they can be together. It just feels too heavy-handed and meta when her mother gives an entire speech about how she’s always chosen emotionally unavailable men and neglected Waldo because of the trauma of her own upbringing, but now she understands how her fraught childhood has manifested in her parenting and her adult life. I was almost relieved that Waldo’s mother goes back to her old ways in the end; maybe I’m too much of a pessimist, but it’s more realistic to me that she promises to do better and then falls by the wayside and goes back to her old ways anyway. Because this happens all the time in real life. All the time.

Waldo herself has a difficult time letting go of her own vices, mainly her shopping addiction. The themes of consumerism aren’t very well explored in this book, though. There could’ve been some sort of deeper critique or examination, which I thought we’d get based on the book’s summary, but instead there are a lot of little scenes—where Waldo buys a ton of junk, feels guilty, and returns half of it—that don’t say a whole lot. Maybe this can be partly attributed to the fact that Waldo’s a teenage girl and just isn’t going to be thinking super deeply about certain issues, but there are still ways to delve into a topic in the narrative even if a protagonist doesn’t want to/isn’t capable of doing so.

There’s a lot of graphic sex in this book. It’s not meant to be sexy or appealing; this story IS about a loser of a man pushing forty who’s taking advantage of a teenage girl. However, the grossness of the sex scenes combined with the frequency of them got to a point where I wanted to fast-forward through these parts. The last couple dozen or so chapters are especially vomit-inducing in their rich descriptions of cheese-smelling dicks and funky morning breath and tooth plaque.

Waldo is turned off by all this too, because even the “bad parts” she once found appealing about Mr. Korgy now disgust her. The veneer is gone. The truth of Mr. Korgy begins to reveal itself—the truth that we as the readers could clock from the beginning but that now Waldo herself is starting to see. He’s stalkerish, weirdly preoccupied with her validation of him, out of touch, depressed about the trajectory of his life and the writer’s block affecting his novel, and trying to be young again through an affair with a teenager who he can “show the world” and feel like some erudite scholar around. All of these realizations are forced to the surface due to their closer proximity and the thrill of the taboo dissipating, with Waldo becoming a high school graduate and Mr. Korgy living out of a motel after breaking up with his wife.

All in all, I do like the ending. Waldo finally lets go of everyone who’s been causing her pain, lets go of her bottomless pit of yearning that causes her to expect more from people than they can actually give, and decides to invest in herself and her happiness for once in her life by taking the return trip to Seward that her mother always promised her but never made good on. This conclusion is especially poignant to me because Waldo decides to choose herself even when her mother tries to make the same commitment but can’t break her ingrained toxic cycles to follow through with it. It shows that we don’t need to wait on other people to start making change for ourselves; sometimes we just need to take that first step alone.

Side note: I hate how nonblack people have appropriated “pick-me girl” to where it’s now appearing in published books…and that is not even the correct way to say that term. Lol.

Another side note: I never read her memoir, so maybe I’ll have to check that out at some point; other reviewers are saying much of this book is influenced by it, which I hadn’t realized (and which is deeply sad).

Pick up this book if you like:

• Complicated mother/daughter relationships
• Critiques of consumerism and the beauty industry (though this aspect feels pretty surface-level)
• Teen girls achieving self-realization and choosing themselves
• High school settings

Pass it by if you don’t want to read about:

• Dark content—in this case, pedophilic age gaps and student/teacher relationships
• Explicit, realistic sex scenes—not meant to titillate, but to disturb
• Loser-ish men, and not even in an endearing way
• Overly religious side characters (Mormon, specifically)