Half Wild

About Half Wild

Half Wild is the second novel in Sally Green's Half Bad trilogy, published in 2015. The book picks up directly from where Half Bad left off: Nathan has completed his Giving and received his Gift — the ability to transform, violently and incompletely, into something other than himself. The Gift is powerful and nearly impossible to control, and the first time it manifests is catastrophic. Nathan is free from the Council's cage, but freedom has not resolved the question of what he is.

The novel follows Nathan as he moves through Europe with a loosely assembled group of survivors: other Half Codes, witches who have defected from the Council's world, and the people who have chosen to fight the Alliance against the Council rather than continue surviving within its system. The group is unstable — its members have their own motives, histories, and loyalties — and Nathan's struggle to keep people alive, including himself, drives the plot.

Green expands the geographic and political scope of the trilogy significantly in the second volume. Where Half Bad was largely confined to England and the Council's immediate sphere of influence, Half Wild moves through continental Europe, showing that the White Witch / Black Witch divide is not uniquely English and that the resistance to the Council has taken different forms in different places.

Nathan's Gift

The nature of Nathan's Gift — and what it means that it involves transformation into something barely human — is one of the novel's central concerns. Nathan is more powerful than he expected and less in control than he needs to be. Green uses this as both a literal plot driver and a sustained metaphor: what does it mean to have power that hurts the people around you, and how do you stay the person you want to be inside a body that is capable of terrible things?

Why It Has Been Challenged

Half Wild has been challenged alongside Half Bad for its violence, dark themes, and morally complex portrayal of institutional persecution. The second novel increases the body count and the graphic nature of some confrontations, and has been removed or restricted in school libraries on those grounds as well as for its broader treatment of war and survival as facts of adolescent life in Nathan's world.