Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy

Seventeen-year-old Waldo realizes on the first day of senior year that what she wants, more than anything, is her forty-year-old creative writing teacher. Her attraction to him is sparked by his honesty, his frank admission of disappointment in the way his life has turned out. It seems so unlike the evasions and defenses of everyone else she knows. His fine lines, his paunch, even his B.O excite her more than the slim bodies, pouty lips, and floppy hair of her previous lovers. Her pursuit of him is relentless. 

Former child actor Jennette McCurdy made waves with her best-selling memoir I'm Glad My Mom Died and Half His Age is her debut novel. By its very premise and aggressive/suggestive cover, it aims to shock and discomfort. 

As soon as I heard about it on the New York Times podcast I placed a hold and once it was available I read it in three sittings over the course of 24 hours. It's bitingly funny, sad, and thrilling. Waldo dispatches love, boys, her absent mother (who hops from man to man pathologically) with swift and merciless humor, and she herself is not immune from her own cynical judgement. Her binge-eating junk food until it hurts ("I've always derived a strange pleasure from the pain of junk food. Icees vacuumed up through a straw in less than a minute so the brain freeze hits hard. Nachos packed with so many pickled jalapenos that my nose runs. Kettle chips heaped into my mouth, my hand a claw excavator, forcing them in as their rugged edges cut my gums.") and filling online carts with fast fashion she knows she'll never wear are cyclical coping mechanisms for the loneliness and disconnect she feels. 

There is something in Waldo that is akin to the (anti-)heroines of Otessa Moshfegh's Eileen and unnamed protagonist of My Year of Rest and Relaxation: Disaffected and lonely, with an intelligence and humor that eviscerates. 

Will Waldo get what she wants? What does she want, really? McCurdy mixes a blend of unhinged and seductive to comic effect, creating a character and a voice full of desire and rage that is completely her own. 

-Michael G.