The young hero is particularly well read as he ages from young boy to 17. Really brilliantly read, for all its horrors, with every character clearly voiced and accented. He has dark hair and black eyes, they have light haired and pale eyes - so is this actually about race? White witches are nice (!) black witches aren’t? If allegory it is, it’s a bit clumsy. I’m not sure if this is meant to be allegorical - he’s a half black witch, loathed and treated like a sub-species by the pure white witches.
there's no break in the story to indicate the end.
It was only about an hour from the end that I discovered there was a part 2, so realised I was possibly heading for one of those awful cliffhanger endings… It isn’t - the end is just the end of a chapter. However, things do improve in the second half, and I stuck with it to find out what was going to happen. If I’d had the book, I’d have skipped to the end. It's all a bit relentless! After about 5 hours of listening I was beginning to wonder why I was still listening, given the never-ending awfulness of Nathan’s lot. He’s tied down and tortured (graphically and horribly) by “the authorities. As a boy/young teen he’s hit, kicked, badly carved up with a knife and constantly belittled by his older sister as a mid-teen he’s kept in a cage, beaten and kicked by people far bigger than him without a chance of fighting back. There are a couple of torture scenes that aren’t nice listening. The description on Audible might lead you to think this is suitable for younger YA’s, but I wouldn’t commend it. He’s told his (wicked, bad, black witch) father murdered his (good, decent white witch) mother his eldest sister subjects him to endless mental bullying and once he’s away from his (nice but powerless) gran, achingly sweet brother and other (ok) sister, he’s totally alone in a very hostile world. It’s fairly standard YA territory - child/teenager, different from everyone else, badly treated by his society, bullied at school and subjected to some graphically nasty abuse.
It’s told entirely in Nathan’s voice, so there are no explanations other than what he can glean, or other’s perspectives. This is set in present day UK, but a present day UK that has witches. There’s no indication on the Audible site that this is the case - although, somewhat belatedly, I see on Amazon that it’s part 1 of a trilogy. Not bad, but there’s some pretty graphic violenceīe aware - this a part one, ending at just a pause in the story, and with part two out March 2015.
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