Book Review | Addictive Romance Has Nothing to Write Home About

If I had any idea that Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy was about its protagonist 17-year-old high school student, Waldo’s sex life, I would never have agreed to review the book. The book starts with Waldo making out with her current boyfriend and then breaking up with him immediately. That’s the leitmotif of the novel, Waldo making out and then breaking up with people.

Waldo, the daughter of a single mother (who had her when she was around 16), lives in Anchorage, Alaska, has bad grades, watches YouTube tutorials and vlogs, lives in a nine-hundred-square-foot apartment, eats food bought from 7-Eleven, works part-time at Victoria’s Secret, shops like crazy on Amazon to fill emotional vacuums in the hope that retail therapy will replace the things missing in her life and has sex like a maniac. Waldo grew up in a trailer with a mother who can’t survive without a man in her life -- a mother who is an emotional mess -- and a father missing in action. Needless to say, she inherited her mom’s emotional makeup.

Into her school life enters 40-year-old Mr Korgy, her creative writing teacher. Mr Korgy, with a wife and a child in tow, battling a growing paunch, managing a mortgage and mounting bills, and dreams that are long dead and buried, makes certain parts of Waldo’s anatomy pulse. And Waldo, of course, listens to those parts of her anatomy all the time. She falls in lust with her teacher and pursues Mr Korgy with such fervour that the poor man gives in and thereafter starts his extramarital affair with Waldo. For quite a lot of time I kept thinking when will these two, with a penchant for congressing anywhere and everywhere, be caught by Mr Korgy’s wife.

Throughout the book I didn’t feel much invested in Waldo at all. It is as if the story had a single-minded purpose, of showing the reader how unlikeable Waldo, after all, was. One can also say obsessive. But I think this book should have come with a statutory warning -- like one finds on certain goods -- because McCurdy adds a detail too many – and too graphic -- for a refined taste -- a feeling many readers will echo certainly.

The writing though is good, if heavily leaning and dependent on Waldo’s internal monologues that slow down the story. But the descriptions are just amazing. Waldo’s relationship with Frannie, a childhood friend, isn’t explored, nor is her relationship with her flighty mom. Her equation with Mr Korgy is restricted to their physical passions, with not much emotional development in both characters. The ending, which I had guessed, was a saving grace.

Half His Age

Jennette McCurdy

Fourth Estate,

pp. 273; Rs 599