The Half Bad Trilogy by Sally Green

The Half Bad series is seriously underrated, but it’s one of my favorites. This trilogy is so unique and original that I almost don’t want to try and explain it; I’m afraid to spoil the magic of the books that way. Sally Green tells an amazing story. The books are gripping, fast-paced and tragically marvelous. I just finished reading the last book in the trilogy and I am so gonna miss Nathan! And Gabriel and…

This trilogy is absolutely unique and original, both in the way it's written and in the darkness of the story itself. The writing is really different, it flips back and forth from second to first person. The timeline is also not quite linear, instead it flips back in time every now and then to explain the current. I loved it, as it's makes the book stand out and also makes you feel really close to the characters. I’m glad I started reading the series when all three books were published; I literally could not put the books down until I’d finished all of them.

Also, the series is kind of brutal, to say the least. It’s set in modern-day Europe, where witches secretly lives alongside humans (fains). The witches are either white (good) or black (bad), aside from 17-year-old Nathan who is half of both. His absent father is the most notorious black witch alive and his mother is dead. It’s as gloomy as it sounds. When we first meet Nathan he is trapped in a cage and abused. Actually, a lot of the book looks back at how Nathan has been mistreated, even tortured, from a very young age because of who his father is, and how eventually he is trapped by the Council of White Witches and put in a cage for cruel tests. Nathan desperately has to escape before his seventeenth birthday, to receive three gifts from his father and his magical ability and become a full-fledged witch. Otherwise, he will die.

Nathan is such a wonderful character. He goes through some absolutely terrible things, but he always has hope and never gives up. Nathan receives help from a series of characters, notably the black witch Gabriel who has lost his powers due to an accident.

​In the second installment, Half Wild, Nathan has escaped and managed to gets his gifts. Now he must decide whether to join the rebelling alliance of free witches and stop the white witch counsel from suppressing and experimenting on black witches, or live a lonely, but free, life. Nathan’s story then comes to close in Half Lost, where the battle is continued and Nathan is being hunted by both sides. I’m not gonna tell too much about the ending, more than that Sally Green definitely knows how to write an epic finale that will shock you.

Of all three books, the second one, Half Wild is my favorite. This is where the love story between Nathan and Gabriel finally takes off for real. It’s such a sweet, wonderful, love story in the midst of all the terrible things going on. It’s also something of a surprise, as inititially Nathan's love life seems to be heading in another (Annalise) direction.
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Some of the best things with the Half Bad trilogy is the surprising love story between Nathan and Gabe, and that it plays with ’grey areas’. White witches aren’t just good and black witches aren’t just bad. Strangely enough, even though Half Bad is about witches, there’s not much magic in it, which is actually a good thing. The story is magical enough in itself.

Find out more about the Half Bad world and the author here: Sally Green