Half His Age

Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy (2026)

★★★☆☆

one sentence summary: A relationship between a high school girl and her teacher.

This counts as a literary book, right?

I picked it up at the library because I had a hold and thought leaving with only one book would be weird. I saw this, remembered a Youtube video the recommendations threw at me (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxOA8LF6dSs ?), and figured why not.

I didn’t love it, but it was literary and very readable and those are good things.

There were too many sex scenes for my taste. Our protagonist Waldo has sex with three different men over the course of the book.

It starts like this on page one:

It’s bad form to groan when a guy’s going down on you

Three sex scenes would be fine, but it’s more like thirty. She has sex with the first guy once and the second guy (of whom she’s Half His Age) a million times and the third guy a few times and her mother has some sex too. Here you go, you’re welcome:

Chapter 87:

And so is Tony, going down on her with his blackened tobacco tongue.

Is that fine? Maybe? Why is sex yucky but blood and gore are totally fine? Am I a puritan?

I didn’t like protagonist Waldo very much but she was well-written. I believe she’s meant to be sympathetic, not likeable exactly.

The ending wasn’t unrealistically happy. Waldo graduates high school, but remains at her minimum wage job, doesn’t attend college, and doesn’t magically start being attracted to men her age.

The teacher, Korgy, is well-written too. He’s mundane and loserish. Not hot or particularly ugly; not suave or comically evil. I wonder if such a character is hard to write? Too far in one direction and he’d be a caricature. On the other hand, go the other way and you’d be accused of sympathizing with pedophilia or whatever.

The book really makes you think about stuff.

Waldo impulsively spends a bunch of money on clothing, makeup, etc. Mini existential crisis: Am I wrong for not caring about these things when I was a teenage girl? No, I know the right answer is “no,” be yourself or whatever, but was I supposed to be more hung up on being perceived as cool, beautiful, impressing males, object of envy? Does it reflect poorly on my social skills that I cared otherwise? Or, worse: I did care, and it did upset me somewhat… but not enough to change my behavior? Conformity has its place.

How did she find a functional car for $1000 in the 2020s, and how does she afford insurance?

Is it inappropriate to call someone “mature for your age” when, objectively, they are?

There’s some commentary about how Waldo initially pursues the Corgi, not the other way around. I’m pretty sure the first time they had sex, she was SAing him. Does that matter at all, or are we going with a blanket “She was under 18 and the adult should know better”? But yes, Corgi does do a bunch of inappropriate things leading up to that.

Neutral/dislikes

The cover. It’s Lolita-esque. Embarrassing for people to see me reading at the airport. Again though, what if it’s intentional? It’s not supposed to be comfortable.

The chapters are very short. There are 273 pages and 88 chapters. The book I read after that had 198 pages and only 8 chapters. Whiplash.

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