Half Bad Review: A Witch Hunt That Gets Under Your Skin

The Witch Story That Trades Chosen-One Comfort for Something Nastier

I picked this up expecting a cozy secret-witch-society romp and got something closer to a fist to the ribs. Sally Green’s debut opens with a boy in a cage, and that image doesn’t let go for the rest of the book. This is YA fantasy with teeth, and it earned every bit of the buzz it got when it first landed.

Nathan Isn’t Built for Your Comfort

Nathan is half White Witch, half Black Witch, which in this world’s rigid caste system makes him a walking threat to everyone, including himself. The White Witch council that raises him treats him like a ticking bomb from the moment he’s old enough to understand what he is, and Green never softens that cruelty for the reader’s sake. There’s no protective mentor swooping in, no found family waiting in the wings to fix things. Nathan is isolated, surveilled, and slowly ground down, and the book makes you sit in that discomfort instead of rescuing you from it. It’s a hidden identity story where the identity isn’t a secret power-up, it’s a target painted on his back, and that inversion is what makes the whole premise land differently than the usual chosen-one setup.

What struck me most is how the narrative voice shifts. Green moves between close third and a raw, present-tense first person for Nathan’s most brutal stretches, and the effect is disorienting in exactly the right way. You feel the walls closing in with him.

The Slow Burn With Annalise, and Why the Discourse Is Split

The romantic thread with Annalise is understated and aching rather than swoony, which some readers adore and others find frustratingly thin given everything else competing for page space. I’m somewhere in the middle. Their connection works best as a symbol of the one soft thing in Nathan’s life rather than as a fully developed ship, and if you’re coming in wanting a consuming central romance, this isn’t primarily that book. It’s more interested in survival, identity, and the machinery of prejudice than in giving you a couple to root for at full volume.

Where It Genuinely Struggles

Here’s my honest gripe, and it’s the one that shows up across reader reviews too: the pacing buckles in the middle third. The forest survival stretch is atmospheric and does real character work, but it also slows the momentum right when the plot machinery around the White Council and the looming birthday deadline should be tightening. Green is clearly more interested in psychological interiority than plot mechanics, and that’s a valid choice, but it means the book occasionally feels like it’s circling rather than advancing. The worldbuilding around witch gifts and the Black Witch world outside Nathan’s cage is also thinner than I wanted, more sketched than fully rendered, which left me curious rather than satisfied.

Where the book absolutely delivers is tone. This is bleak, morally complicated territory, closer to a psychological thriller wearing a fantasy coat than a typical magic-school adventure, and if that’s what you’re after, it’s genuinely well done.