The new trick is to stay in the present … Get lost in the detail of it … 

With the Smoke Thieves coming up I wanted to finally read the Half Bad trilogy. I didn’t like it extremely all that much.

Book Review: Half Bad trilogy by Sally Green

Rating:

Title & Author: Half Bad trilogy by Sally Green
Genre: Fantasy, Adventure
Release date: March 4 2014
Series: Half Bad
Publisher: Viking Books

Synopsis

Wanted by no one.
Hunted by everyone.

Sixteen-year-old Nathan lives in a cage: beaten, shackled, 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 there is no one safe to trust, not even family, not even the girl he loves?

I give the Half Bad trilogy by Sally Green three out of five hearts because the series wasn’t that great. I felt the series started out with pretty strong, but then slipped and stayed in this not very interesting land until the end. It didn’t keep me interested until the end.

The story seems to have some influences of something like the second world war. The way people are treating Nathan in the first novel (and parts of the other two novels) as a Jew, but his father is Hitler.

Nathan is the son of the most wanted Black Witch and lives with his grandmother at the beginning of the book but all the White Witches are against him because he is a half White and half Black Witch. He is being trained as a White Witch. But when he doesn’t follow the rules the Council has put out for him, he is taken away from his grandmother to be taught by some other woman. She was weird and it made me feel like the nazi camps the way that woman treated him.

The plus point on this novel are that the characters have good development during the series. But I couldn’t care for Nathan, only his grandmother, and the plot was long-winding. I feel the entire series could have been put in only one (or maybe two) books. There is no information given on the characters or the world. The writing is sometimes terrible, calling skin ‘skin-coloured’ (WTF?).

This series has a lot of similarities with Harry Potter, a corrupt Council, Hunters, Pure and Fain (a word for non-magical people). It felt a bit strange and too much a like. But in total it was a very thin copy of Harry Potter.

Overall I would say to stop reading the Half Bad trilogy after Half Bad and leave Half Wild and Half Lost on the shelf. It is the best of the series and rounds things sort of off by the end of the novel. After that is was not the greatest anymore.

Let me know what you thought of this book!
If you have any requests for which book I should talk about next, please let me know in the comments down below.

For now, let books enrich your life!

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