You can optimise it further, however: For each favorite, create a 'UserFavorite' entity as a child entity of the relevant Story entry (or equivalently, as a child entity of a UserInfo entry), with the key name set to the user's unique ID. This way, you can determine if a user has favorited a story with a simple get:
UserFavorite.get_by_name(user_id, parent=a_story)
get operations are 3 to 5 times faster than queries, so this is a substantial improvement.