Book review: Half Bad by Sally Green

BOOK REVIEW: Half Bad by Sally Green

Half Bad
by Sally Green
Book description from Goodreads:

Half Bad by Sally Green is a breathtaking debut novel about one boy's struggle for survival in a hidden society of witches.

You can't read, can't write, but you heal fast, even for a witch.

You get sick if you stay indoors after dark.

You hate White Witches but love Annalise, who is one.

You've been kept in a cage since you were fourteen.

All you've got to do is escape and find Mercury, the Black Witch who eats boys. And do that before your seventeenth birthday.

Goodreads Link 

My review:

***4 STARS***

 I'm glad to say that I enjoyed this book. The beginning put me off a little as it was quite confusing and the writing didn't pull me in. Have I told you how much I hate writing in verse? It was why I couldn't get into We Were Liars by E. Lockhart. The timeline in this book was a bit jumpy. The beginning started off with present time about Nathan getting locked up, then it jumped into when he was young and the transition of timeline was so abrupt it left me scratching my head. 

Let me flip through the first page.

"There's two kids, boys, sitting close together, squished in by the big arms of an old chair. You're the one on the left.

The other's boy's warm to lean close to and he moves his gaze from the telly to you, sort of in slow motion.

'You enjoying it?' he asks. 

You nod. He puts his arm around you and turns back to the screen."

There you have it. W.T.F right? The writing to me felt clumsy and the author had this thing with changing pronouns. One minute it's in second person pov, then in other pages it's in first person. Um . . . what am I supposed to say to that . . . I guess if pulled brilliantly, it could possibly work but in this case, I feared it didn't. 

And it was kind of slow that I planned to DNF it but it got interesting in the later part of the story. That's where all the whizz bang came in. This storyline was indeed very unique and I enjoyed reading Nathan's pov. It was a bit . . . weird but definitely unique. And the way he thought of his dad (the dad is the Big Bad Witch) that he didn't really hate his dad even when his dad killed many witches got me thinking, so is Nathan really more of a black witch than a white one? 

Anyhow, the ending was a cliffhanger (sort of). It's moving on to the next adventure. Let me tell you something though. Read this book. It's unique and some parts are very cleverly woven but it will leave you depressed. Because Nathan's story is depressing and the poor boy is being hunted for the rest of his life just because he's half bad.