Half Bad by Sally Green

Publisher’s summary: In a world of witches, there is only good and evil.

Begin the hunt!

Sixteen-year old Nathan lives in a cage: beaten, shackled like a dog, trained to kill. In a modern-day England where two warring factions of witches live amongst humans, Nathan is an abomination, the illegitimate son of the world’s most terrifying and violent witch, Marcus. Nathan’s only hope for survival is to escape his captors, track down Marcus, and receive the three gifts that will bring him into his own magical powers-before it’s too late. But how can Nathan find his father when his every action is tracked, when there is no one safe to trust, not even family, not even the girl he loves?

Half Bad is an international sensation and the start of a brilliant trilogy: a gripping tale of alienation and the indomitable will to survive.

My Take: So…Half Bad is just crazy insane! Some of the things in this book were so crazy that I had a hard time even imagining them happening!

First off, I want to talk about the writing style of this book! I read the non-Americanized manuscript and I don’t know how much the writing style will change in the final Americanized version, so I won’t talk about some of the wording I didn’t understand that I had to research online to figure out what the author was talking about (that was fun!) Anyways, the writing starts off as if someone were speaking to you directly, putting “you” (the reader) in the actual POV of a boy (Nathan) who’s locked in a cage and you are being told, step-by-step, what you are doing. I wasn’t really a fan of this style because it was hard for me to distinguish between what was actually happening with what the boy really wanted to happen. Then the second part of the book is in the first person past tense POV of Nathan before he was put in the cage, but there’s also a little portion of this section that was written as if Nathan’s older sister is telling him about what happened to him when he was only a baby. By a little more than midway through the book, the story leads back to the present tense and moves forward from there.

Other than the writing, the story itself was crazy! I felt so bad for Nathan throughout the story. There is a cute romance that was introduced, but the crazy, bizarre things that Nathan endures were way more interesting to me than the romance. Once the story got to the present tense, I think that was when I really started to like the story, and the last few chapters were by far my favorite. There are a few characters that were introduced in those last few chapters that I really liked, along with a whole change in scene, and everything that went down in the end was totally awesome. And the very last scene was just brilliantly done! It left me thrilled with the end, but also left so many doors open for the story to continue!

After reading this book, I’m really excited to see what others will think of this story. I think that it’s one of those stories that you either will really like or that you will really NOT like. I can hardly wait to see!