Demon hunting and fantasy, count me in! Half City has all the makings of my roots in fantasy. I grew up on stories like this and urban fantasy, but I ended up leaving and wondering where I was. Keep reading this book review of Half City for my full thoughts.
Summary
Viv Abbot is an average twenty-one-year-old girl. She lives in an expensive city where the rent is too high, works long hours at a thankless job, and is dating a guy she doesn’t even like in the hopes of winning her prickly mother’s approval.
She just also happens to be a demon hunter.
Ever since her father’s murder, she’s been forced to hunt deviants alone, meaning everyone, including her family, sees her as an outsider. . . . Until the day she crosses paths with a dangerously alluring demon, Reid Graveheart. The reformed deviant tells her of a school for people just like her: Harker Academy for Deviant Defense. If she enrolls, she’ll learn to hone her craft, work with other hunters, and never be alone again.
But Viv has a deadly secret. One that not even her new friends at Harker can know about. Not when the school might hold the answers to untangling the mystery surrounding Viv’s father’s death. When strange occurrences begin to plague the students, Viv will have to figure out who she can trust, and fast. All while trying to ace her classes, not fall for a demon, and make it through her first year at Harker in one piece. How hard could that be?
Review
(Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher. This has not impacted my review which is unbiased and honest.)
Half City has all the elements of books I like and have loved in the past. I grew up on urban fantasy and so I was excited for this mix of urban fantasy and academy setting. To be fair, we quickly jump into the academy setting and so I wouldn’t expect as much as I did. I liked this setting of sparring and how much of a disadvantage she has. Viv is the ultimate underdog here. But I think what let me down the most is Viv’s character. I had a really hard time connecting with her. She keeps her cards close to her chest and even if I was in love with her personality, it’s hard to get the sense we know her.
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She keeps a lot of the events of the past to herself and it means she acts in ways we don’t quite understand. The animosity – and alluded to past – with her main rival/enemy comes totally out of left field. It’s more than just a hatred of demons, there’s more and even more confusingly so, he also seems to single out how much he doesn’t like her too? And these vibes, and frustration, continued the whole time I was reading Half City. While we get more explanation for this, it happens so late that if I wasn’t reviewing I might have given up. I wanted to love this one, but it just wasn’t clicking for me fully and when it got close, it was too late for me to feel like I was loving Half City. Find Half City on Goodreads, Storygraph, Amazon, Bookshop. org, Blackwells, & Libro. fm.