A review by sbufkin
His Favorites by Kate Walbert

4.0

This is a short, tight, claustrophobic novel about the narrator’s relationship with a sexually predatory teacher at a boarding school. This is not a story of complicated or fraught affection, as it often seems to be in narratives about teachers and students. This is a novel about a teacher who forces himself on his student and uses his position of power to protect himself. It’s about trauma (several layers of it, as the novel opens with the narrator accidentally killing her best friend in a golf cart accident). It moves quickly, and reading it gave me a pervasive sense of anxiety, but it was about trauma without making me feel overly traumatized, which I appreciated.