The Bastard Son and the Devil Himself: Now a major Netflix series

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Previously Deputy Editor of tech site Alphr, his words are found all over the web and in the occasional magazine too.

But as the book went on, the limitations of the plot revealed themselves - imagine Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and all the running around and hiding, but without the friendships, the deep back story and the big showdown in the end. The counsel were always having Nathan come in to be assessed to see if he had more of the white gene or the black gene but they never could determine it.I wanted things to work out for Nathan and Annalise, but because she was a white witch and Nathan was a half-code, that seemed to be worse than Romeo and Juliet. I quite liked the story in the beginning - the cage, the brutality, the freshness of the narrator's voice (oh yes, this boy IS half bad). Elsewhere in the finale, Ceelia confronted Soul while Annalise confronted Jessica in two very tense one-on-one battles. This lasted 'til about three quarters which is when I realized we really hadn't gotten anywhere in the story.

Unsurprisingly - and as every decent novel should remember, in my opinion - there is never really anything as simple as "good" or "evil", despite what Nathan has been told his whole life. If I'm going to read Dracula, I want some fucking vampires, and I want them to suck the bloody hell out of some humans.It was this part that disappointed me the most - the "journey" was so dragging that I was skipping pages upon pages just to get to the end of it (doesn't help Nathan became a cardboard character at this point). What's left is a lot of going from one place to another and meeting various underdeveloped characters with a very clear and rather uninteresting end point (it's not a spoiler - finding the main character's father). The world building: the world is divided between fains (muggles, that is), Black Witches and White Witches. The reason I'm giving this four stars is because while reading I actually felt like the author was very inspired by Harry Potter that her book was infected by the main idea behind it, but it was also completely different and very well executed! We’ll see if Netflix manages to direct some attention its way, but for now, it seems like everything is kind of stacked against it.

I chanced across a copy of the "Half Bad" unedited manuscript at the 2013 BEA, and decided to take a chance.A new show can only get recommissioned if it gets good viewing figures, but why would viewers bother getting invested in something that may be cancelled with no satisfying resolution?