Half Bad

About Half Bad

Half Bad is the debut novel of British author Sally Green, published in 2014 by Viking Books for Young Readers in the United States and by Penguin in the UK. The novel is set in a version of contemporary England in which witches — both White and Black — exist alongside ordinary humans, governed by a Council of White Witches that enforces a strict legal and social hierarchy. Black Witches are classified as dangerous, corrupt, and beyond reform. The Council hunts them.

Nathan is seventeen years old and caught at the center of this world's most fundamental division. His mother was a White Witch — part of the establishment. His father, Marcus, is the most feared Black Witch alive, hunted by the Council for decades. Under the Council's law, Nathan is a Half Code: part White, part Black, legal only under strict supervision. He has spent his childhood in a cage. He has spent his adolescence being evaluated, trained, and contained.

The novel opens with Nathan already in the cage — a literal one — and uses alternating second-person and third-person narration across different time periods to reconstruct how he got there and what he is trying to survive long enough to do. Nathan needs three things to complete his Giving — the witch coming-of-age ceremony at which he will receive his Gift — and he needs them before his seventeenth birthday. One of those things is his father, whom he has never met and who the Council would execute if they found him first.

A World Built on Persecution

Half Bad's fantasy world is constructed as a sustained metaphor for the functioning of prejudice. The Council of White Witches decides who is acceptable and who is dangerous not on the basis of evidence but on the basis of parentage and category. Nathan has done nothing wrong. He is categorized as a threat because of who his father is. The institutions that claim to protect him are the same institutions that cage him.

The novel was shortlisted for multiple awards and adapted as a Netflix series, The Bastard Son & the Devil Himself, in 2022.

Why It Has Been Challenged

Half Bad has been challenged in school libraries primarily for its violence and dark themes — Nathan's captivity, the brutal physical training he undergoes, and the death toll of the world Green constructs. Some challenges have also cited its portrayal of institutional persecution and its moral ambiguity about who the real villains of the story are, in a setting where the established authorities are demonstrably unjust.