His Favorites by Kate Walbert
This book was the second book randomly selected for my Up Up & Away book club. I had never heard of it or the author, which is why I join book clubs. I know that I will not like everything, but I could find a hidden gem. His Favorites was more a book that I did not completely enjoy, but it was an interesting read nonetheless and sparked some emotions in me.
In His Favorites, Jo is looking back on the time in her life after the death of her best friend, a death she had an unintended hand in. She has been sent away to boarding school for no other reason than she has become a pariah in her town and her parents are divorcing. When Jo is selected for an upper level English class, she knows it has more to do with her looks than her brains. But what Jo does not know is just how many Favorites this teacher has.
The story is told with Jo looking back as she tells her story. While I do not have an issue with that, I did have an issue with the story jumping around a lot. It would talk about the night her friend died, then when she is at the school, and then go to before her friend died, and then in the interim between her friend dying and going to school, and then after she left school, and then back in school. It was not consistent. This was my biggest issue with the story. I pride myself on being able to follow confusing timelines, but this one was so all over the place, I was getting whiplash.
The tone of the story also felt very monotone. When she should have been made or sad or the rare instances of happy, I never felt it. Maybe it was because she was looking back in time, and telling the story to help with a court case, but I never felt a blip of any sort of emotion out of her, and it made it really hard to connect to her.
What I did connect to was the response Jo got when she finally got the nerve to tell the headmaster. Men, especially older men, are quick to write off a woman's response to another man's advances, or in Jo's case, abuse. Especially when you think about that this part of her life took place in the 1980s. There was no Me Too movement; court rulings about physical and sexual abuse were few and not taken seriously. America was still holding on to that Mad Men mentality that a woman's place is barefoot in the kitchen and if she is going to decide to put herself in a place to be assaulted (although they would never call it that), it was her own fault. I have talked with people about how a man has made me feel when he stands over me, looks at me a certain way, gets offended when I turn him down, and most women will sympathize and share their own story. Men though, not all of them, are more likely to say I read too much in to it and I should not take it seriously. I have even had someone tell me "well look at what you are wearing," like that was an excuse for a catcall. That was the same thing Jo was told when she went to the headmaster. And even more upsetting is that female staff knew, and either could not or would not do anything about it. I do not work in a school system, but I cannot imagine letting anything like this, whether it be the slight verbal assaults or actually sleeping with his student, go by without doing anything.
On a story standpoint, His Favorites has a good plot. However, the writing was not one that I could get in to, and in points I felt took away from the plot.
Rating: 5/10
Author: Kate Walbert
Genres: Contemporary, Fiction
Dates Read: March 4-6, 2019
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| (Source: Kelsey Darling) |
"Anyway, some time near December break-a return home I dreaded given how quickly everything had fallen apart without me, or because of me, I suppose, my father gone and my mother's constant chatter about her new 'friend' she had met on her trip to Portland-I heard a familiar laugh and looked up to see Master and Charlotte P. in a booth against one of the dirty Depot windows. The two both familiar and strange, too glamorous in the weak winter light coming through the smeared wndow, as if lost sophisticates had somehow found their way to the other side of the tracks-literally-and were now surrounded by what Hawthorne students called Townies, early-morning truck drivers and maintenance workers, employees of the paper mill farther down Oak. They held hands, or sort of, their hands more tangled across the table than held, and they both leaned forward, her knee touching his, or it looked that way, it looked as if her knee might have been pushed up against his." (p. 20-21)
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| (Source: Giphy) |
The tone of the story also felt very monotone. When she should have been made or sad or the rare instances of happy, I never felt it. Maybe it was because she was looking back in time, and telling the story to help with a court case, but I never felt a blip of any sort of emotion out of her, and it made it really hard to connect to her.
What I did connect to was the response Jo got when she finally got the nerve to tell the headmaster. Men, especially older men, are quick to write off a woman's response to another man's advances, or in Jo's case, abuse. Especially when you think about that this part of her life took place in the 1980s. There was no Me Too movement; court rulings about physical and sexual abuse were few and not taken seriously. America was still holding on to that Mad Men mentality that a woman's place is barefoot in the kitchen and if she is going to decide to put herself in a place to be assaulted (although they would never call it that), it was her own fault. I have talked with people about how a man has made me feel when he stands over me, looks at me a certain way, gets offended when I turn him down, and most women will sympathize and share their own story. Men though, not all of them, are more likely to say I read too much in to it and I should not take it seriously. I have even had someone tell me "well look at what you are wearing," like that was an excuse for a catcall. That was the same thing Jo was told when she went to the headmaster. And even more upsetting is that female staff knew, and either could not or would not do anything about it. I do not work in a school system, but I cannot imagine letting anything like this, whether it be the slight verbal assaults or actually sleeping with his student, go by without doing anything.
 |
| (Source: Giphy) |
Rating: 5/10
Author: Kate Walbert
Genres: Contemporary, Fiction
Dates Read: March 4-6, 2019
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