Half His Age is the kind of book that feels like watching a train wreck in slow motion. You want to look away, you probably should look away, and yet you can’t. It’s vulgar, bold, piercing, and deeply uncomfortable in a way that feels entirely intentional. I stayed up far too late reading it because it made me so angry and unsettled, and that, to me, is part of what makes it so effective.

What struck me most is that this is not simply a book about abuse, though abuse is undeniably at its centre. It is also a story about power, loneliness, neglect, overconsumption, internalised misogyny, the damage of fractured family relationships, and the desperate ways people try to make themselves lovable. There is so much going on beneath the surface here, and I think this is a book that really asks its reader to think critically. McCurdy does not flatten the story into something easy or neatly moralised. Instead, she builds something messy, sharp, and psychologically revealing.

Waldo is one of the most fascinating parts of the novel because she is so far from a “perfect victim.” She is self-centred, judgmental, sexually aggressive, and often deeply unlikeable. She projects endlessly onto the people around her, inventing stories about who they are and what they feel, convincing herself she understands everyone better than they understand themselves. She casts his wife as a villain, and him as a helpless, miserable man in need of rescue. But that is exactly what makes her feel so convincing. She is contradictory, insecure, performative, ashamed, desperate to be wanted, and constantly reshaping herself into what she thinks others might desire. In other words, she feels painfully, believably seventeen.

That contradiction is what gives the book so much of its emotional force. Waldo insists on her own maturity, yet every attempt to prove how grown up she is only highlights how young and vulnerable she actually remains. McCurdy captures that tension brilliantly: the way adolescence can feel like adulthood from the inside, even while everyone reading can see how exposed and naive you truly are. The novel never lets us forget that Waldo is still a child, no matter how much she tries to convince herself otherwise.

I also appreciated how clearly the novel traces the connection between Waldo’s home life and the abuse she experiences elsewhere. It does not shy away from parental failure, and some of the most chilling parts of the book are the parallels between the demands placed on her by her mother and by Mr. Korgy. The similarities in how she must shrink, adapt, soothe, and perform for both of them are devastating. That thread gives the novel a depth that makes it feel like more than just a story about one inappropriate relationship. It becomes a larger portrait of a girl who was never really allowed to be a child in the first place.

And Mr. Korgy is written with exactly the kind of manipulative horror that makes your skin crawl. The power imbalance is never in doubt. He taunts, withholds, manipulates, and exerts control in ways that feel horribly familiar, and the book captures with terrifying precision the way someone in power can engineer a situation until the younger, more vulnerable person feels like they are the one asking for it, choosing it, even begging for it. That dynamic is handled so sharply that it makes the novel hard to read at times, but also hard to dismiss.

I do not think this is a perfect book, which is why I’m landing at four stars rather than five. But it is an undeniably powerful one. It made me furious, uncomfortable, and deeply sad, and it kept me completely locked in from beginning to end. It is provocative in the best and worst ways, and certainly not a light or easy read. But if you can handle the subject matter, it is absolutely worth reading.

Heart the Lover is another stunning novel from Lily King, and one that reminded me yet again how exceptionally good she is at writing about the inner lives of people: their longings, contradictions, old wounds, private self-deceptions, and the quiet ways they keep carrying the past into the present. This is a novel about first love, but it is also about everything that follows it: the stories we tell ourselves to survive, the lives we go on to build, the families we choose, and the strange, enduring power of the people we once believed would define us forever.

What I loved most about this book is how emotionally intelligent it is. Lily King never forces a feeling. She doesn’t dramatize for effect or lean too hard on sentimentality, and that restraint is exactly what makes the novel hit so deeply. Her writing has that rare quality of feeling elegant and understated while still delivering real emotional force. So much of the novel unfolds in the space between memory and reality, between what happened and what Casey has allowed herself to believe happened, and King handles that terrain with incredible precision. She understands how memory can preserve, distort, soften, and mythologize all at once.

This is also such a beautiful novel about the persistence of our younger selves. The person we were at eighteen or twenty does not simply disappear; she lingers, sometimes embarrassingly, sometimes painfully, sometimes tenderly, inside the person we become. Heart the Lover captures that so well. It understands that first love is not always important because it was the truest or healthiest love, but because it became foundational to the story we tell ourselves about who we are. And sometimes untangling that story can feel as profound, and as destabilizing, as living it the first time.

I also really appreciated how much the book is about more than romance. Beneath its love story, there is so much here about chosen family, motherhood, regret, forgiveness, and the lives that continue alongside our great emotional myths. The novel is often funny, sometimes frustrating, and full of the kind of emotional messiness that feels recognizably human. No one is flattened into a type. Everyone feels shaped by time, by compromise, by longing, by the small and large ways life does not go according to plan.

And then there is Lily King’s style, which I honestly find so impressive. She writes with such clarity and control, but never in a cold or distant way. Her prose is lean without feeling sparse, lyrical without drawing attention to itself. She can sketch an entire emotional history in a few lines, and she has a remarkable gift for saying exactly enough. The result is a novel that feels deeply felt on every page, but never heavy-handed.

More than anything, Heart the Lover is about how we remember love and how those memories become part of our identity. It is about illusion, yes, but also grace: the grace of looking back, the grace of seeing more clearly, the grace of accepting that the past may never fully loosen its grip on us. It is tender, wise, witty, and quietly devastating. By the end, I felt that particular kind of ache that only the best literary fiction can produce, the sense of having been let into something intimate, flawed, and profoundly true. This book lingered with me long after I turned the final page, and to me, that is always the mark of something special.

The Vegetarian was an interesting read for me more than a deeply affecting one. I could clearly see what Han Kang was trying to do, and I really appreciated the themes the novel explores: bodily autonomy, control, repression, violence, desire, and the ways society punishes anyone who refuses to conform. It is a dark, unsettling, and often grotesque book, and I can understand why so many readers find it disturbing. But while it was definitely shocking in places, I personally didn’t find it difficult to get through. In fact, I moved through it quite quickly.

That said, I admired this book more than I loved it. The ideas are strong, and there is a lot here to think about, but for me, the plot felt a little too thin to fully carry the weight of those ideas. At times, it felt like the symbolism and atmosphere were doing more work than the story itself. I also struggled with the choice of narration. Because we never truly enter Yeong-hye’s mind, there’s a sense of distance at the center of the novel that kept me from being fully emotionally invested. I understand that this may have been intentional, but it also meant that I spent much of the book observing her rather than connecting with her.

Overall, I found The Vegetarian thought-provoking, strange, and memorable in parts, but not quite as powerful as I had hoped. I can appreciate its craft, its ambition, and the conversations it opens up, even if it didn’t completely land for me as a reading experience. For me, this was an okay read with strong themes, but not a must-read.