Half His Ageby Jennette McCurdy (Ballantine). This consuming novel, written by a former child star who is also the author of a best-selling memoir, tackles an unsettling subject: intimacy between teen-agers and adults. Her narrator is a seventeen-year-old girl who begins a relationship with her forty-year-old writing teacher, Mr. Korgy. Though, at the outset, the girl seems to be the driver of the affair, as the story develops, it becomes apparent that she is motivated by wounds left by her absent father and by her mother, who has an “addiction” to love and sex. Eventually, her romance with the teacher is cast as just another way to cope with her pain. “Maybe it’s all the same,” she thinks. “Korgy and pants and YouTube and makeup and sweaters and junk food and sex. Maybe they’re all just distractions from me.”
Under Waterby Tara Menon (Riverhead). This melancholic début novel weaves between New York City in 2012 and a small island in the Andaman Sea in December, 2004. As a girl, the narrator lived on the island with her father, a marine biologist, and spent many of her days in the ocean with her best friend, Arielle, luxuriating in the semi-wilderness. As an adult, she works at a travel magazine, repackaging developing-world destinations with adjectives such as “pristine” and “rugged.” Her life is studded with losses—including that of her mother, and, later, of Arielle—and, as she wanders through New York, the past hovers with ghostly insistence. Above all, she mourns Arielle with a kind of longing that she feels society fails to recognize: “There is no place in our language for grief about friends, or love for them.”