Half Bad: Sally Green

“I had sort of guessed that Celia had an issue with me, or rather with me being the son of you-know-who.”

You-Know-Who? Is it just me or did this book suddenly turn into Harry Potter? Main character is half white witch half black witch, Harry shares a connection with Lord Voldemort……Anyone else?

ANYWAYS here is how I felt about the rest of the book…

Half Bad is all about Europe in which white (good) witches and black (bad) witches exist. Nathan is the son of a white witch and the most notorious black witch ever. So, naturally he is bound to face some difficulties. The witch concept is super cool and each witch at 17 receives 3 gifts and finds their ability (invisibility, potion making, other stuff everyone wishes they could do..)

The first thing I noticed is that this book has really weird structure. The chapters sort of jump around and can be less than a page long. The first couple of chapters or so are in the present but then the book goes to the past for the next 100 pages then finally, finally back to the present. Basically, the parts of this book focusing on past events in Nathan’s life I found were much more developed and good to read. The present parts were boring and contained too much information that I found very non-essential until more of the action part of the book came along.

I felt that “past” Nathan had more depth and was easier to understand whereas “present” Nathan fell a little flat and his emotions seemed rather superficial.

The best parts of this book and what made it worth reading was the information on witches, the struggles Nathan went to to escape his predicaments, and also the suspense and some short action scenes where we got to see witch abilities do their thing.

There is a romance in this book and I definitely get the sense that the rest of the series will be love driven but…. UGH here is the thing. This book did not develop the “love” between these two characters enough to make it exciting for the reader. Also, the emotions the characters share are nice but they lack a sense of reality.

This book was ultimately pretty good, good enough to make me ready to read the next in the series, which can take a lot sometimes. If you are naturally in to YA Fiction/Adventure/Fantasy reads I would say GO FOR IT, if not then maybe pass this one up….

Half Wild I am coming for you!