RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewHalf His Age is McCurdy’s first novel, a reverse Lolita tale that dares you to flinch, squeal and/or chuck your book out the window, but ultimately rewards the fearless reader. Though it’s a classic bildungsroman, the reading experience felt more like watching a slasher flick, with me shaking my head and shouting to an empty room: \'Don’t answer his text! Don’t go to his house! Don’t get your period in his closet!!!\' This is a bold and unapologetic novel for edge-seekers, doom-scrollers, latchkey kids, horn-dogs and all those who love hard ... Besides the obvious Nabokovian echoes (underage girl/old schmuck), I was reminded of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho while reading. McCurdy brings exacting attention to material things in her book ... Sex is, of course, another way we try to be made real, witnessed into fleshliness when we feel like hot air ... This is what Half His Age is ultimately about, scandal and sex scenes aside: the dead end of longing, whereby you ask people or things for the love they can’t give you, and how lonely this mismatch can feel.
Eliza Robertson
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe novel’s sexual dynamics are certainly strange, but even at their most scatological, they’re soft. I wasn’t expecting so light a touch: like a kiss on the brow when you expected to be slapped. You’ll obsess over this kiss for a fortnight ... It’s exciting to see boy-girl relations explored with such candor, with no room for easy answers, tidy endings, clear consent ... Robertson conjures a languid world, a Didion-esque tumble-dry of summery whites. The book is of a piece with André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name and other soft-core explorations of how we mess one another up, and realize it only later ... I crave Robertson’s take on the objects and tensions of my own life. Rarely have blurred lines, in weird sex or otherwise, been explored with such grace.
