Half City by. Kate Golden | Book Review – Past Midnight Book Reviews & More

My Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Spice Rating: 🌶️🌶️

Title: Half City (Harker Academy, #1)

Author: Kate Golden

Format: hardcover and ebook

Pages: 496

Publication Date: 2/17/26

Categories: Urban Fantasy, Dark Academia, Series, Romance, Paranormal, Mystery

Welcome to Harker Academy for Deviant Defense. Keep your daggers sharp, and your wits even sharper.

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 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 if 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, all while trying to ace her classes, avoid falling for a demon, and make it through her first year at Harker in one piece. How hard could that be?

Content Warning: violence, death

+ Set in an alternate Earth, Harker Academy is a place for demon hunters to learn and train to hone their skills. Viv trained since she was a child with her father, who was a hunter – but he never told her about this school. So when Viv gets an invitation to attend, she goes for the sole purpose of finding out more about her father. Being at Harker Academy open Viv to a whole new world and some secrets revealed leads to betrayal. I loved all the paranormal elements and the fights with different species and monsters. I also was invested in the mystery aspect of the story.

+ I like Viv but she definitely has her stubborn moments. She’s dealing with grief and guilt, but she also is the black sheep in the family. Her mom is running for mayor and it’s all about being proper and keeping up with appearances in her family but Viv is a hunter. And aeon hunter at that so the desire to hunt and kill is strong in her blood, not politics. At first she is someone who doesn’t want to get close to people, she has a best friend she loves dearly in the mortal plane, but at Harker she meets hunters like her and I loved how she grows. She is at times impulsively because of her aeon blood that is hyper-focused on stalking her prey, but she learns the longer she’s at Harker that maybe getting help is a good thing.

+ I loved the secondary characters like Sophia (her roommate), and her other new friends Peter and Eliot. I thought there was a good balance of academia and action in the book. I liked both the scenes of Viv learning in her classes and also being out in the streets hunting.

+ The romance is a slow burn between student and teacher but I really liked how it progressed. Reid is a demon but allowed to teach at Harker, even though he is the enemy. But throughout the story we get to know a little more about him each time and I love how eventually their attraction grows and they learn they work better together than separate – since Viv is stubborn enough to not listen to him. And the spice between them was nice!

~ There is a very abrupt cliffhanger ending! I’m so happy book two comes out this year as well.

~ Viv is leading a double life, she spends all her time at Harker, which is on another plane, and she’s lying to her family and best friend of where she is living. But I didn’t know how she could pull off not showing up to work for 3 weeks – it works out too conveniently for her.