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![Halfway Dead (Halfway Witchy Book 1) by [Terry Maggert]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51EgZTpwhtL._SY346_.jpg)
Halfway Dead (Halfway Witchy Book 1) Kindle Edition
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Working at the town diner isn't her only job, for Carlie is also a good witch who will do bad things to protect her town. Trained by her Gran, she'll be asked to follow a handsome stranger into the deepest forest to find a grove of sacred trees, but there are ghosts in the forest, and one of them cries out to Carlie across the years: Come find me.
With the help of a vampire who's been marooned for a thousand years, she’ll fight to bring a ghost home, and deliver justice to a murderer who hides in the cool, mysterious green of a forest gone mad with magic.
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateJune 29, 2015
- File size519 KB
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Product details
- ASIN : B010MZ24LA
- Publication date : June 29, 2015
- Language : English
- File size : 519 KB
- Simultaneous device usage : Unlimited
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 265 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #249,488 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #316 in New Adult & College Fantasy (Books)
- #417 in New Adult & College Fantasy (Kindle Store)
- #8,564 in Teen & Young Adult eBooks
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About the author

Left-handed. I like dragons, coffee, waffles, running, and giraffes; order unimportant. Let's keep in touch. https://linktr.ee/terrymaggert
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Halfway is a town in the Adirondack Mountains “exactly halfway in the middle of something,” a liminal space that’s equal parts “tourist destination, pit stop for travelers, and a repository of more things magical than I care to think about” - which is why protagonist Carlie McEwan frequently finds herself occupied with the mysterious hidden world around this cozy town. Strange forces have begun to stir in Halfway Dead. When a dumb YouTuber gets himself lost in the unforgiving mountain terrain, he unwittingly stumbles upon one of the last surviving groves of American Chestnut trees, thus setting off a race to find the trees...which happen to be sitting upon an area rife with dark, dangerous magic, and home to an equally dark mystery in Carlie’s family history. Aided by a mysterious investigator and a vampire Viking hermit, she must venture into the woods to stop this magic - before it kills (again).
I knew I was going to like Halfway Dead the moment I picked it up - I mean, waffles and magic, what more could a girl ask for? - but I ended up surprised by the specific ways in which I liked it. Frankly, the plot was the least interesting thing about it - not because it wasn’t interesting, but rather because the world and characters surrounding it were that much more interesting. More than the quirky magical adventure that the tagline led me to expect, Halfway Dead reads like a love letter to the beauties and dangers of the Adirondack Mountains. This is heightened by the fact that Carlie’s magic is nature-based, equally as beautiful and equally as dangerous as the natural world from which it derives. The book is also clear that Carlie is not a storybook witch or a stereotype (“I’m a witch. A real one, not some amateur who reads things on the Internet and likes to dress up.”), and while I don’t know enough about the practices of modern witches to comment on the accuracy of the depiction, the practical, down-to-earth way in which her magic is presented has the depth of research-based writing. Maggert’s descriptions of Carlie’s magic are simply wonderful, with thoughtful attention to detail that ultimately builds to Carlie’s own evaluation of her skill (“For now, I treat my magic like a new pair of shoes. Someday we’re going to love each other, but for now we’re just trying to fit together comfortably”) and her treatment of both nature and things in general (“I take care of my things, because they return the favor”).
I could easily see a modern witch practicing in the same way that Carlie does (albeit without the same magical clout), and this is one of the hinges upon which the book rests.
The other hinge is the town of Halfway itself, and the mountains surrounding. Halfway is unique among fictional mountain towns in that it’s not a Deliverance-inspired backwater, but a cozy town where everyone knows everyone, the locals are charming, where Carlie’s magic is known and appreciated (though not by all and not entirely fathomed even by those), and its only real limitation (or perhaps one of its greatest strengths) is its sheer distance from everything else.
I’d go to the Hawthorn Diner to try Carlie’s waffles as much as I would to hear of Tammy Cincotti’s dating conquests, take tea with Carlie’s classy, fearsome Gran, or just to hear the servers talk their special brand of diner pidgin that names a half stack of pancakes after the shortest member of the staff and somehow makes raisin bread appealing by rechristening it “bug toast.” I would eat bug toast here until Carlie had to magic up a spell to roll me out. The town is a homey point of pleasantry buried deep in a mountain range that, despite its wondrous beauty, does not give a slice of bug toast whether the people hiking it live or die, and that’s even before one considers the magical forces at work in it.
A side note: One can’t fully appreciate this book without having some appreciation for the Adirondacks themselves - or really, any vast swath of wilderness largely untouched by human presence. To that effect, if you like to read books in themed clusters, Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods pairs excellently with Halfway Dead, both because of its similarly reverent sense of wonder and terror toward the woods and because it provides historical context that enhances certain parts of this novel. Halfway Dead clearly establishes that the pivotal American Chestnuts are severely endangered, the species nearly wiped out during a blight in the early 1900s, but a later read of A Walk in the Woods took my reaction from “Ok, so they found some chestnuts” to “HOLY SH** THEY FOUND AMERICAN CHESTNUTS! :D :D :D” Plus it’s just a good read for people who like the idea of hiking but not the inconvenience of probably being eaten by bears in the isolated wilderness. But I digress.
If I were to fault Halfway Dead for anything, it would be how complicated the plot becomes at points. There are lots of characters and lots of different motivations circling around every facet of the conflict, from people who want to protect the pivotal American Chestnuts, to people who want to exploit the Chestnuts (both independently of the magical storyline), to Carlie’s family history surrounding that grove, to the aforementioned Viking vampire, who has his own complicated reasons for being in the woods in the first place, to the dark force at the center of it all, which has origins the reader never would have expected at the beginning of the novel. It all comes together nicely in the end, but until the reader reaches the end, it sometimes makes for a disjointed first read as one wonders why exactly the novel focuses on this new character or that new detail without a reason that’s apparent in the moment. (On the flipside, though, it makes the second read-through that much more entertaining.)
That said, its plot pretzel can be a bit exhausting - but the world in which that pretzel was tangling was so appealing that, in the end, it barely diminished the reading experience. If you’re looking for a cozy contemporary fantasy with just a twist of darkness, and a waffle-slinging witch who wrangles it all with panache, Halfway Dead is a must-read.
Midway through the book, I started to notice that some people/events introduced were treated a little more superficially than I would like, while others were made to appear important and then abandoned. I was excited to turn the page, to learn more, to walk in that world, but, by the last page, I felt a bit let down by the 1-2 line superficial, reader's-digesty type wrap-up of events, issues & characters I thought were going to be meaningful, but apparently were nothing more than plot movement devices. <<< possible spoilers>>>>
Every book has events, topics, and characters that really are not missed if one glides over them. Tyler, the lost hiker, is a perfect example here, yet he's mentioned all the way through the book. I would have preferred a little more explication on what happened/might happen with the whole mythic roving-fountain-of-youth-in-a-circle-of-extinct-Chestnut-trees-as-a-gateway-to-hell-or-evil-nursery thing that was totally dropped after the fight scene. The 2-sentence detail on what happened to Major is as laughably inadequate, as is the wrap-up of the dangling Anna/daughter sub-plot. The Pickford family and several other minor characters were either eaten by pixies or will show up in subsequent books as regulars, but we never heard from them after they cropped up as suddenly as a meaningless diner waitress and poofed when you turned the page. The book may not have ended on a cliff-hanger, but it went out with a whimper.
Because this is book one in a series, we can expect to learn more about Gran, Bindie, Wulfric, Gus, and possibly even Brendan. We may even run into Anna later on, but I have to wonder how any of them will be treated -- given how fast and how carelessly Jim was dismissed without a backward glance. There was at least as much chemistry with him as Wulfric, and I even thought a love triangle was being setup to evolve over the series - so that romance was a surprise and not really well developed. The juxtaposition of a main-character death addressed with a single 'tears-were-shed' type sentence next to the poetic, tearful fae gathering/memorial send off for Erasmus really ticked me off. Jim fricking deserved better treatment than the long-dead, never-met relative who killed him. When other characters move through the series in the future, I will always be wondering if the author is going to treat them as thoughtlessly.
I WILL be reading book 2, in the hope that the positive aspect remains, and the superficiality is applied only to the characters and events that deserve them.
Top reviews from other countries

I would have given this book 5 stars, however I read the second book in the series first and it was even better than this magnificent debut.
Carlie is a powerful young witch who watches over her little secluded town with her Gran. She is drawn in to a misadventure to discover some previously thought extinct trees but ends up in a life threatening situation, mixed up with Vampires, Lycanthropes and Fae.
The flow of this story is excellent, it takes place in first person from Carlie’s perspective – she’s funny and utterly compelling. I loved being inside her head and already know that I’ll be happy to wedge myself back in there for the rest of the series.
Maggert exploits his excellent command of the English language by writing a very witty and enjoyable story, while at the same time using an impressive breadth of vocabulary without sounding strained or out of place.
I would absolutely recommend this book to anyone who likes paranormal books or witty characters.



