Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy * * * *

Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy was marketed in a way that makes you expect something almost salacious. A teenage girl. An affair with her teacher. It sounds like the setup for a dark romance, or at least a scandal-driven story.

This is not that book.

I read it expecting drama, exposure, fallout. What I got instead was a quiet, uncomfortable, and very honest portrait of a girl who is trying to grow up while still desperately wanting to be a daughter.

Waldo is seventeen at the beginning and eighteen by the end. She is raising herself. Her mother drifts from job to job, boyfriend to boyfriend, and her father has been absent for years. She waits to be seen. To be chosen. To be loved. And although at first it seems like she has given up on that hope, she really hasn’t. She still lives for it.

She goes to school. She works. She manages her own life. But there is a constant emptiness under everything she does, a kind of hopelessness she never quite names.

Then she meets her new creative writing teacher.

She seduces him. And he lets her.

It should feel shocking. It should feel like the centre of the book. But strangely, it never does. Because from the very beginning, their relationship is not written as titillating, not romanticised, and not built around the taboo. Instead, it is presented almost clinically, matter-of-factly, through Waldo’s dry and detached perspective.

And that perspective changes everything.

In this relationship, Waldo often feels more emotionally mature than the forty-year-old man she is with. He is the one grasping at youth, at dreams he never fulfilled, at escape from his wife, his son, his disappointments. She becomes a symbol of those things for him. A way out.

For Waldo, he becomes something else entirely. A place to search for the love she never received. A substitute for the feeling of being wanted. Needed. Chosen.

The affair is not the point. The need behind it is.

You keep half expecting the story to turn into a scandal. For them to be found out. For the book to explode into consequences and drama.

But again, this is not that book.

This is a story about a girl who believes she is already grown up, while still clinging to the hope of being someone’s daughter. Someone’s priority. Someone’s enough.

She hides her problems in a shopping addiction; possibly even a sex addiction. She never confronts the emptiness directly. She just keeps filling it with things, with people, with attention. And somewhere deep down, she knows that to be okay, she would have to let go of all the things she thinks she needs.

But she cannot.

By the end, there is loss. But also something that feels like release. A quiet sense of freedom. And, surprisingly, hope. The kind of hope you do not feel at the beginning of the book at all.

The audiobook is narrated by Jennette McCurdy herself, and her flat, matter-of-fact delivery fits Waldo’s voice perfectly. The story is told in first person present tense, which adds to the dryness and the almost brutal honesty of how Waldo describes her own life, her thoughts about sex, relationships, school, and her future. She talks about everything without emotional decoration, and that restraint makes it hit harder.

This is a dry book. But not in a dull way. In a precise way. In a way that refuses to dramatise what is already deeply uncomfortable.

It never pretends this is a romance. It never tries to convince you that this relationship is beautiful, or healthy, or something to root for. It simply shows you why it happens.

And that honesty is what makes it so compelling.

I would not call this an easy read. But I would call it an intriguing one; a sharp, unsentimental look at what it means to grow up when no one is there to guide you, and how badly we can mistake being wanted for being loved.

That distinction stays with you after you finish.