50% in and he still hasn't found her, but I honestly wish I'd counted how many times he thinks 'I must find Annalise' or 'I need to save Annalise' during that time. The book opens with him thinking about her and wanting to find her. what is the story here beyond Nathan's obsession with Annalise and her skin? Seriously. I disagree, but whatever, it's not like I needed them for this book to be so unbelievably boring. Maybe you think racist descriptions and cultural stereotypes are no big deal. Nathan describes him as having an Australian accent, and yet this is not enough, because the author throws in a couple of 'crikeys!' and 'mate's whenever he speaks, just so we fully appreciate his Australianness.

A couple of chapters later (Nathan wanders around thinking about his dad and - you guessed it - Annalise during this time), the most Australian character I've ever encountered appears. It's like Disney's Sleeping Beauty, with about the same amount of non-white people.īut this is just an ARC and people make stupid mistakes, right? Surely the author didn't intend to make it sound like that, right? So I continued on. Oh shucks, somebody please save the blonde-haired, blue-eyed, white chick who's landed herself in some kind of magical coma. I can sum up about 80% of the plot into nothing more than finding and saving Annalise. It's like everything evil, nasty and fast-paced has just been sucked out of this story. The first few chapters are filled with Nathan's dreams of Annalise: touching her, exchanging bland conversation, staring at her skin-coloured skin and eye-coloured eyes (blue, I'd wager). Fuck knows what colour skin other ethnicities supposedly have.

Not surprisingly, the character in question - Annalise - is white. Barely more than twenty pages in I was forced to do a double take when I read:īad use of descriptions aside, I cringed when I tried to conjure an image of what 'skin-coloured' could possibly mean. So if you do happen to read this and discover something amazing, it's possible that it happened while I was busy not caring.

I'm going to be completely honest and say I found myself skim-reading parts of the second half because it just could not hold my attention. This is not the sequel I had hoped for when I closed Half Bad last year, exhilarated and excited for the next installment.

The half bad trilogy