At first glance, the premise sounds deceptively familiar: a seventeen-year-old girl named Waldo begins an affair with her middle-aged creative writing teacher, Mr. Teddy Korgy. On paper, it risks sounding like another contemporary “taboo relationship” novel built to provoke discourse and little else. However, in reality, Half His Age is far more psychologically precise than that. It's not romantic fantasy masquerading as literary fiction.

Poppy and Alex don’t fall in love in the way most stories would have them do it. There’s no clean beginning. No single moment where everything changes. Instead, it’s a slow accumulation—shared trips, long conversations, habits that start to look a lot like dependence. By the time the question of “what are we?” comes into focus, the answer has been there for years. They’ve just avoided saying it out loud.

A lot of what happens here takes place in the mind rather than in space. There are still battles, still stakes, but they feel different. It's quieter, in a strange way and more abstract. It took me a while to settle into that, and I’m not sure I ever fully did.