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    His Favorites
    His Favorites
    His Favorites
    Audiobook3 hours

    His Favorites

    Written by Kate Walbert

    Narrated by Gabra Zackman

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    A “tense, taut, and thrilling” (Marie Claire) novel about a teenage girl, a predatory teacher, and a school’s complicity from the highly acclaimed, bestselling National Book Award finalist and author of A Short History of Women—“riveting, terrifying, exactly the book for our times” (Ann Patchett).

    They were on a lark, three teenaged girls speeding across the greens at night on a “borrowed” golf cart, drunk. The cart crashes and one of the girls lands violently in the rough, killed instantly. The driver, Jo, flees the hometown that has turned against her and enrolls at a prestigious boarding school. Her past weighs on her. She is responsible for the death of her best friend. She has tipped her parents’ rocky marriage into demise. She is ready to begin again, far away from the accident.

    “Devastatingly relevant” (Vogue) and “fueled by gorgeous writing” (NPR), His Favorites reveals the interior life of a young woman determined to navigate the treachery in a new world. Told from her perspective many years later, the story coolly describes a series of shattering events and a school that failed to protect her. “Before things turn treacherous, there’s a moment when predation can feel dangerously like kindness…Walbert understands this…His Favorites begs to be read” (Time).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateAug 14, 2018
    ISBN9781508265092
    Author

    Kate Walbert

    Kate Walbert is the author of seven works of fiction: She Was Like That, longlisted for the Story Prize and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; His Favorites, an Atlantic Monthly Best Book of the Year; The Sunken Cathedral; A Short History of Women, a New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of the Year and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Our Kind, a National Book Award finalist; The Gardens of Kyoto; and the story collection Where She Went. Her work has appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize stories. She lives with her family in New York City.  

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    Reviews for His Favorites

    3.5/5

    60 ratings7 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I happened upon this book while searching for another, and the premise intrigued me. It is a short read and contains a timely message, but ultimately this one didn’t impress me as much as I had thought it would. Oh how I wanted to enjoy this book more. The premise and the characters were intriguing, but it was difficult to be fully invested in the story when the prose is overelaborate and prone to digressions. There were too many times when Jo would recall a memory, and then go into a long winded tangent about something unrelated to her subject, and I kept thinking “get to the point!”. I also wished for more insight about Jo in the present and whether she had healed from her trauma or not.
    • 4/5
      Jo Hadley is 15 - the age of possibility and promise. She has 2 best friends, Carly and Stephanie, but in impetuous teen fashion, they make devastatingly bad choices - drinking, getting high and taking out a golf cart at night at the country club 2 belong to. Jo is driving and when she crashes the cart, Stephanie is killed instantly. The rest of the small but powerful novel tells of Jo's departure from her MD hometown - it was clear she could not stay - and her enrollment at a prestigious MA boarding school, where she begins in Oct. of her soph year, in 1977. Vulnerable, alone, plagued by guilt and remorse, she takes solace in books and writing and catches the attention of Master Aikens, a star literature teacher whose classes are invitation only. Becoming one of "his favorites" has an exacting price and Jo examines this in hindsight. Eloquent and reflective enough to give some distance to some raw and terrible events, which make them read-able without that stomach-churning need to turn away. Ultimately, Jo inspires admiration and the situations inspire outrage.
    • 4/5
      This brief novel is what I would call impressionistic: dreamy descriptions that never really give a comprehensive description of what happens. There seems like there should be a point to the tale, a conclusion, a dramatic scene to bring it all together, but there never is. It's like trying to find the details of a battle in a typical Turner sea painting - there's drama, but it's obscure, a matter of how it "feels" rather than a clear depiction. Not my cup of tea, although the writing itself is atmospheric and clearly the work of a talented author.
    • 5/5
      Every once in a while, I happen to encounter a young writer on only her fourth or sixth novel. The prose has a different texture, some of the characters have memories similar to mine. I sit down to read and touch the un-familiar paper, with maybe a small, warm font to entice me. This time, the young writer is Kate Walbert, and this, her third novel to be shelved and eventually joined by others. In this case, Kate Walbert has revived these memories. His Favorites is the novel, and I have just this minute finished reading her warm and near pleasant narrative. Kate Walbert was born in August 13, 1961. She was a finalist for the National Book Award for her novel, Our Kind. Her novel, A Short History of Women, was a New York Times best seller, which was also named as one of the ten best books of 2009. She lives in New York City. Only three novels will catch me up to these wonderful novels.Jo Hadley has suffered all the problems attending a divorce. Walbert writes, “That year my mother, a beautiful woman given to her own fowl play, divorced my father and took up with a much younger man, someone she met at a farmers’ market on a trip to Portland. She will move to the West Coast and eventually marry him, adopting and training shelter dogs as service animals, forswearing liquor, pot, and meat in short order” (14). She says, “It’s not the story you wanted me to tell” (14). That line made me hunger for the story she wanted to tell.She finished boarding school and moved onto college. The early scenes in the novel remind me of John Knowles and his iconic coming of age story, A Separate Peace. That was one of the first novels of that sort I read in high school—copies of Catcher in the Rye were scarce, and if found in my possession, there was a heavy price to pay.The first chapter set in her college, began thus, “Master Aikens was one of those teachers. Everyone called him Master, or sometimes, M. I saw him for the first time in late October, a few weeks after I arrived at Hawthorne, leaning against one of the columns in the portico between the science building and the library, holding court for a group of the boys. I recognized one from my American Histor seminar, Teddy Pyle, and several who looked like upperclassmen, the juniors and seniors I did not dare speak to * the times I followed Lucy and the other girls to watch them play Frisbee in the football field” (15). Master had a, “constant orbit that circled him wherever he seemed to be, laughing, always laughing; Mister hilarious, I heard, and cool” (15).Towards the end of the novel, Walbert writes, “There are four other girls in Modern Lit besides Charlotte and me, although they are not his favorites. We are still his favorites. The others are smeared, their edges blurry, bleeding into the background, dissolved around the seminar table. I barely see them. And he pays little mind” (140). The student, Susan, is a brilliant student, but in this case, she refuses to answer. Kate writes, “Master walks over to stand behind her, placing a hand on either padded shoulder. ‘Cat got your tongue?’” // ‘I forgot what I wanted to say,’ she says. // ‘Happens to the best of you,’ he says, winking at us from behind Susan. ‘But don’t you look lovely,’ he adds” (141). Kate Walbert, in His Favorites, has written an unforgettable story which will chill you on a warm winter’s night. Don’t miss it! 5 Stars. --Chiron, 10/9/18
    • 5/5
      His Favorites by Kate Walbert is a novel best read with as little knowledge about it as possible. The book begins with fifteen-year-old Jo hanging out with her two best friends one night, when they decide to steal a golf cart and go joy-riding around the course. His Favorites is a very short novel, that covers a lot of ground, but each paragraph and sentence is so well-crafted, and the book is so well put together that it has the impact of a much larger work. If you decide to read it, I highly recommend learning as little as possible about the plot as possible.
    • 4/5
      This is a brief and affecting novel with two tragedies which come down brutally on the head of Jo, a high school girl who carelessly gets her best friend killed in a stupid accident. Jo then goes on to be preyed upon by a slimy predatory teacher at an exclusive boarding school. As she unwraps the horrors of that year, the reader is caught between having contempt for her harmful actions, and recognizing her vulnerability and the impact of her neglectful parents.
    • 4/5
      DEVASTATING BUT TIMELY. Three young girls, fifteen, drinking, decide on a lark, stealing a golf cart for a wild, nighly ride, that has a horrific end. Enough so a mother feels the urgent need to give her daughter a new start, sending her away to a boarding school. What she encounters there will haunt her for the rest of her life.The me too movement, the abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, people entrusted with power of one sort or another, instead use it for their own gain. Preying on the weakest, able somehow to suss them out of s crowd. This book, relatively short, shows just how it's done. Teenage girls, wanting to be popular, part of the in crowd, ignoring the little voice that tells them it is wrong. Bullying, of one who is different, doesn't fit with the crowd, so heartbreaking. Believe me, this small book packs a punch. Beautiful prose, direct, alternating between the before and after. Hard to read, but necessary I think if one has daughters or granddaughters. If the grown women in the Me too movement found themselves victimized, what chance do the young have? ARC from Edelweiss.