Half His Age by Jeanette McCurdy Book Review
- Danielle Robinson
- May 9
- 6 min read
Jennette McCurdy’s Half His Age isn't interested in being tasteful. It is interested in being honest. This is a novel that will divide readers not by whether they understand it, but by whether they're willing to sit inside it's discomfort long enough to see what it's actually doing.
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. It's actually a deeply claustrophobic examination of loneliness, neglect, grooming, female adolescence, and the unbearable hunger to feel chosen by someone.
Waldo is one of the most convincing teenage narrators I’ve read in years because McCurdy refuses to clean her up for the reader. She's messy, obsessive, self-destructive, funny, performative, insecure, perceptive, cruel, needy, numb, and painfully intelligent all at once. She spends her evenings eating junk food in bed, scrolling endlessly online, filling shopping carts she regrets moments later, and waiting for some kind of emotional event to crack through the monotony of her life. Her mother drifts in and out of the apartment through sticky notes left on the fridge, her friendships feel unstable, and
her romantic relationships with boys her own age leave her emotionally vacant. By the time Mr. Korgy notices her writing, Waldo has already been conditioned to believe that attention itself is love.
That's what makes the novel so effective, and so upsetting.
McCurdy understands that grooming rarely arrives looking monstrous. Korgy doesn't present himself as a villain. He presents himself as thoughtful, honest, creative, sad, and worldly. He listens to Waldo, he notices her talent, and he offers intellectual validation at a point in her life where almost nobody is seeing her as a full person. The novel’s brilliance lies in how accurately it captures the emotional confusion of that dynamic. Waldo believes she's pursuing him. She believes she's is in control, and she believes she's mature enough to understand what's happening. The reader, meanwhile, watches the imbalance widening in real time.
What Half His Age does particularly well is expose how easily neglect creates vulnerability. Waldo’s relationship with Korgy doesn't emerge from nowhere. It grows from isolation, emotional abandonment, and being left alone too often for too long. The novel repeatedly returns to food, shopping, beauty routines, reality television, clothing, makeup, and consumption as coping mechanisms. Waldo is constantly trying to fill herself with something, whether it's attention, sex, validation, products, fantasy, or distraction, because she's never learned how to sit comfortably inside herself.
The consumerism motif throughout the novel is especially sharp. Waldo’s compulsive online shopping isn't shallow characterisation; it becomes an emotional language. She buys clothes, cosmetics, lingerie, and skincare products in the hope that transformation might finally make her worthy of permanence. Victoria’s Secret, where she works, becomes the perfect symbolic setting: a place built entirely around the performance of desirability. McCurdy is very aware of the connection between femininity, consumption, and self-worth, particularly for young women growing up online.
There's also an extraordinary amount of dark humour in the novel. McCurdy has always been skilled at balancing devastation with blunt comedic timing, and that voice carries through here. Waldo’s observations are often brutally funny in the exact way real young women can be when they're trying to survive humiliation. The humour never undercuts the seriousness of the subject matter, but it does prevent the novel from collapsing under it's own emotional weight.
What surprised me most, though, was how sad the book ultimately becomes once the fantasy begins to rot.
Korgy initially appears fascinating because Waldo sees him through the haze of longing. As the relationship progresses, the glamour deteriorates. He becomes smaller, needier, weaker, more selfish, and more repetitive. The relationship itself turns domestic and stale in the ugliest possible way. This is one of the smartest choices McCurdy makes. The novel understands that exploitation often survives through fantasy, and once reality enters the room, the illusion starts collapsing under it's own contradictions.
By the final sections, Half His Age stops being about forbidden desire and becomes something much subtler: a girl slowly realising that she's mistaken being wanted for being valued.
The ending is restrained in a way I deeply appreciated. McCurdy avoids melodrama, so there's no explosive reckoning, or grand speech, or neat catharsis. Waldo simply reaches a point where her body refuses the life she's forced herself to tolerate. So, her final decision feels less like triumph and more like the first fragile movement toward selfhood. It's one of the few moments in the novel where solitude no longer feels like abandonment.
This isn't an easy book to recommend universally. Some readers will find the sexual explicitness confronting, while others will dislike how repetitive and emotionally cyclical Waldo’s thought patterns become. A number of people will inevitably misread the novel as romanticising the relationship because McCurdy allows Waldo to desire Korgy without constantly interrupting the narrative to reassure the audience of the “correct” interpretation.
Personally, I think that restraint is precisely what gives the novel it's power. Half His Age trusts the reader enough to inhabit contradiction. It allows Waldo to be complicit and vulnerable simultaneously, allows Korgy to appear charming while still being deeply harmful, and for loneliness to distort judgement without turning it's protagonist into a moral lesson. Most importantly, it understands that the damage of these relationships is often psychological long before it's visible.
This is a difficult, sharp, and intimate novel that feels less interested in being liked than in being truthful. I suspect that 's exactly why it will stay with so many readers long after they finish it. It certainly has for me.
Book Details
Title — Author Half His Age — Jennette McCurdy
Paperback ISBN: 978-1668077993 (Simon & Schuster US edition; varies by region)
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1668077979 (Simon & Schuster first edition)
eBook ISBN: 978-1668078006
Genre: Literary Fiction, Contemporary Fiction, Coming-of-Age Fiction, Psychological Fiction
Tropes / Literary Threads: Age-gap relationship; teacher-student dynamic; grooming; female loneliness; emotional neglect; coming-of-age; obsession; emotional manipulation; consumerism; compulsive shopping; parentification; toxic relationships; identity formation; self-destruction; secrecy; emotionally unavailable adults; girlhood and desire; loneliness in adolescence; female rage; unhealthy attachment; vulnerability and validation; emotionally immature adults; searching for self-worth; performative femininity
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Series: Standalone
Formats Available: Hardcover, Paperback, eBook, Audiobook
Audiobook Narrator: Jennette McCurdy
Release Date: July 22, 2025
Page Count: Approx. 304 pages
Awards & Recognition: Instant New York Times Bestseller; widely discussed literary debut following McCurdy’s memoir success; praised for psychological realism, emotional honesty, and nuanced portrayal of grooming and loneliness; compared to My Dark Vanessa, Everything I Know About Love, and Vladimir
Setting: Anchorage, Alaska; primarily suburban and domestic settings including East High School, Waldo’s apartment, Victoria’s Secret, Korgy’s home, and surrounding Alaskan roads and landscapes
Comparable Titles: My Dark Vanessa — Kate Elizabeth Russell; Vladimir — Julia May Jonas; Everything I Know About Love — Dolly Alderton; Boy Parts — Eliza Clark; Acts of Desperation — Megan Nolan
Themes: The inherent harm in adult-child relationships; loneliness and longing during adolescence; consumerism as emotional avoidance; emotional neglect; parentification; female identity formation; performative femininity; desire and validation; emotional dependency; self-worth and autonomy; secrecy and shame; growing up without emotional guidance
Critical Reception: Praised for its psychologically sharp narration, emotional complexity, dark humour, and uncomfortable realism. Critics and readers particularly highlighted the nuanced portrayal of grooming, loneliness, and female adolescence. Some criticism centred on the repetitive emotional cycles, explicit content, and frustrating nature of both Waldo and Korgy. Widely regarded as emotionally confronting but deeply compelling contemporary literary fiction.
Where to Buy (Australia): Available via Booktopia, and independent Australian bookstores.
Danielle Robinson is a literary critic, writer, and interior curator whose work explores the relationship between literature, home, and heritage through a reflective lens. Holding a double degree in philosophy and theology, she brings academic rigour to her writing alongside a cultivated, deeply aesthetic sensibility. Danielle is an internationally published, multi-award-winning makeup artist and former fashion stylist and interior stager, with over 30 years’ experience shaping visual and cultural spaces. She reads widely and rigorously, reviewing more than 200 books each year as both an ARC reader and commissioned critic. Through her platform and podcast, Silk & Sentences, she considers literature not simply as text, but as atmosphere—something that informs the way we live, curate, and remember. She writes from her meticulously curated rural Queensland home, where she lives with Alex, her husband of 33 years, her dog, Oscar, and surrounded by family & close friends at every opportunity.
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