Review: His Favorites: A Novel by Kate Walbert

His Favorites: A Novel by Kate Walbert

Blurb from Goodreads:

From the highly acclaimed, bestselling National Book Award finalist and author of A Short History of Women, a timely and propulsive novel about a teenaged girl, a beloved English teacher, and his dark, open secret.

It seemed harmless enough. They were having fun, three teenaged girls speeding on a golf cart through the greens, at night, drunk. The cart crashes and one of the girls, Stephanie lands violently in the rough, killed instantly. Neither the driver, Jo, nor the other friend is physically injured.

Jo—an instant social pariah—flees her hometown and enrolls in Hawthorne, a prestigious boarding school, far away from the stigma of the accident. Her past weighing on her conscience, Jo is determined to make things right. Then she encounters the charismatic English teacher. 

This fiercely urgent story reveals the interior life of a young woman reeling from trauma and trying to make sense of her treacherous new world and its betrayals. Walbert, who brilliantly explored a century of women’s struggle for rights and self-fulfillment in her award-winning A Short History of Women, limns the devastating, all-too-common violations of vulnerability and aspiration. From the publisher of the classic A Separate Peace, His Favorites is a taut, heartbreaking novel by a “wickedly smart writer” (The New York Times Book Review) whose work is “fascinating, moving and significant” (The Washington Post).

My Review:
 

Um, I feel like this wasn't finished - like only half a book.  It was so short and it jumped around so much between past and present.  I suppose it might even be charitable to call this a novella? It seemed like and read like a journal, a draft of a testimony, some stray thoughts that were the beginnings of an outline of a novel.  So many unformed thoughts, so many stories left hanging and unfinished. Abandoned. I wish there were more -- more explanation, more words, more finality.  

His Favorites came out earlier this week on August 14, 2018, and you can purchase HERE.

"You should treat your words with more," he said.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"And never apologize," he said. "What is it with you girl always apologizing? As if everything is your fault--the Fall of Rome, the Crusades, Watergate, we men the cause of every great fuckup in history and you girls the sorry, sorry magpies. Apology parrots. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry," he said, his voice falsetto.