Half Wild is a pacy thriller and definitely more grown up than the first novel – huge fun. Additionally, Annalise is still in the picture – Nathan believes that if they can defeat the Hunters, then he and Annalise can be together – but it’s never going to be that simple. The white witch hunters are still after Nathan and Marcus and the novel becomes a thriller – a classic chase across Europe. There is a real feel of European witchcraft being something venerable and ancient and the upstart white Hunters emanating from England upsetting the apple-cart in this – a little bit of politics there! The battles between Green’s black and white witches will outdo the Volturi in Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight books. We also meet a key character in black witch Gabriel, a Frenchman, who will become Nathan’s best friend. In Half Bad, most of Nathan’s time was spent with white witches – some of whom are very bad indeed! In Half Wild, the sequel, he spends most of his time with black witches – most of whom are more tolerant than you’d expect rather a role reversal. Nathan is getting to know his father Marcus, and discovering how to use his gifts which are X-Men type superpowers rather than spells. If you’ve not read the books, you should now skip to the bottom of the post, The main sub-plot has Nathan falling in love with Annalise, the daughter of high-up white witches – a relationship that can surely never flourish in this divided land.īeing about witches, some rather unfairly described Half Bad as Harry Potter for teenagers – there was a lot of setting up to do with flashbacks to Nathan’s earlier years, but the opening chapter where Nathan is being held a prisoner in the Welsh hills told me that these books would be more Chaos Walking than Harry Potter. Kept captive by the Council, Nathan must escape and find his father.

With his mother dead, that means Marcus, his father, should do the giving.

England is controlled by the Council of (white) Witches, and Nathan is approaching his seventeenth birthday when he should be given three gifts and blood by an ancestor. In the first, Half Bad, we were introduced to the young Nathan Byrn, son of a white witch mother and the most powerful of the black witches as his father. I’ve loved all three volumes of Sally Green’s Half Bad Trilogy.

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