Kate Walbert's most powerful novel yet is a case study in the perversities of power imbalances. This slim but by no means slight novel continues Walbert's explorations of how society's sexual biases and constraints have hampered women ... Walbert, known for sophisticated, multiply-stranded narratives that span generations, has pared her new novel into a sharp blade ... With Jo Hadley, Walbert has created a consummately credible character, convincing as both a bright, vulnerable, traumatized yet un-self-pitying teenager and a sympathetic, clear-eyed but bruised adult ... Walbert heightens the suspense by cutting back and forth in time, as Jo puts off the most difficult parts of her story ... Jo is a savvy raconteur who recognizes that there are many ways to frame a story, from different perspectives ... Walbert's novel is fueled by gorgeous writing as well as moral outrage. It's an artful argument for the importance of the long overdue #MeToo movement, but it's more than that ... His Favorites is heartbreaking and galvanizing.
If you’ve ever read a news story about sexual abuse and thought, oh, seriously, how could it have gone on for so long? Why wouldn’t she have told someone at the time? This book will answer all your questions ... It’s as if she’s trying to tell the reader what happened while making it clear we don’t have to worry about her. Boy, do we worry about her. This is a wildly compelling and completely believable tale that is exactly the book for our time. How does #MeToo happen? It happens like this. His Favorites was a real favorite in the back room at Parnassus.
His Favorites isn’t so much a novel — or even, at a slender 150 pages, a novella — as an experiment in taking control of a narrative ... The result is that her abuser — a 34-year-old modern literature professor called 'Master, or Master Aikens, or M,' is the flimsiest part of His Favorites, a shadow rather than a substantive presence ... And His Favorites isn’t a simple narrative of trauma and survival, but something more challenging, and potentially more valuable — a reckoning not just with the reality of abuse, but with the pernicious ways it can shape and inform everything, even the stories you tell yourself.
The title refers to girls like Jo, chosen by the 'cool' teacher for 'special attention' and sexual grooming in an era before #MeToo. Struggling to find her place in an alien social hierarchy, Jo herself becomes an unwitting participant in an episode of group bullying directed against her socially awkward, opera-loving roommate ... Rendered in crystalline, matter-of-fact prose relating the narrator's own emotional numbness and distancing, this self-aware metanovel is well timed for our current political era. Walbert...packs a punch.
Walbert’s...latest is a sharp look back at school days that are anything but idyllic ... Jo finds herself saddled with an unpopular roommate and quickly gaining the attention of Master Aikens, a beloved, pompous, charismatic literature instructor ... her rage over the blind eye the school turned toward Master and his transgressions is palpable. Walbert’s slim, impactful novel, distinguished as all her work is by beautiful writing and a wealth of literary allusions, could not be more timely.
Her new book is being marketed as a novel; at 160 pages, it’s more of a novella, but what it really feels like is a short story that outgrew the form without quite becoming something else. There are flashbacks to the night of the accident that add nothing since what happened is not a mystery; Jo begins her narration with a thorough account of that night. There is also a superabundance of information about Hawthorne—its history, its traditions—when all the reader needs to know is that it’s a New England prep school. Most problematic, though, is the emotional flatness of the story, which is particularly disappointing from a writer as skilled at illuminating the inner lives of women as Walbert. Timely but not the author’s finest work.
Walbert...compresses into this taut, powerful novel one woman’s painful recollection of her sexual relationship at age 15 with her 34-year-old high school English teacher ... Jo narrates with brutal honesty, using declarative sentences (Master’s preferred style). Her story, filled with rage and regret and intensified by its searing portrait of self-aware, self-destructive teenage girls, provides a case history in male-female relationships built on imbalance of power.
