My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I've had my eye on this book for a while and last night, I decided to give it a go. Before I even started, I knew what to expect. I mean, the cover is a dead giveaway, so I expected a book that deals with the same issues as My Dark Vanessa.
Waldo is seventeen and desperately craves connection. She usually finds it in physical relationships with guys her age, but when she meets her new creative writing teacher, she fixates on him. Mr. Korgy is a middle-aged married man with a kid, but that doesn't stop her. Or him...
Wow, this is a very well-written book. It's also infuriating. On the surface, it's about a horny and very selfish, greedy young girl in desperate need of attention. A teenager who uses sex to get her way. But the further I got into the story, the more I realised what was really going on.
Waldo is a complicated character who seduces her teacher and once they start an affair, doesn't realise she's not in control of the situation anymore. Her desperate need to satisfy him and keep Korgy in her life blinds her to the truth: that a grown man is using her for sex and to escape his shitty life.
As awful as she is, because she does some terrible things, I actually felt sorry for her. She's a teenager with an absent mother who's more concerned with keeping boyfriends than taking care of her daughter. Waldo has pretty much raised herself and spends most of her time alone cleaning the apartment, eating junk food, while also working part-time. Waldo has a shopping addiction she continually feeds, that gets worse when her anxiety ramps up, and her only friend sees her as a charity case.
So yeah, Waldo is a victim of circumstance. A child forced to grow up so fast she even refers to herself as a woman when she's really a child. A child who wants to be loved so much she gets caught in the web of a man who takes advantage of a situation she hands him on a platter. And continues to serve up, as she disregards the truth every time it threatens to surface.
I found Waldo's story quite sad. I also found her voice very easy to read and the snappy chapters work well for such a raw, crass story that's so disturbing. A lot of what happens is uncomfortable and infuriating because the truth was right there all along, sandwiched between her terrible actions and Korgy's shitty behaviour. But I actually like the ending.
One final thing: as much as I hated Korgy because he's a fucking loser and an abuser, I also accumulated a lot of anger towards her mother. The person who let her down the most.
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