Skip to main content

The School for Good and Evil Book Review

  By Ankita Bhargava



(Spoilers for the first two chapters of The School for Good and Evil)

The School for Good and Evil by Soman Chainani revolves around two girls named Sophie and Agatha. They live in a small town, where every four years, two children are kidnapped by the School Master. Those children (one good, one evil) later show up in storybooks that mysteriously arrive in the village, after being taken to twin schools of good and evil. Sophie's dream is to be a Good princess, while Agatha is the perfect candidate for and Evil witch. However, when they are finally taken to the school, Sophie is taken to the School for Evil, while Agatha is taken to the School for Good. 

I really liked this book because of the way that it immediately introduces the character's personalities, their flaws and their relationships with other characters. In the first page, we learn that Sophie wants to marry a prince and that she is a little conceited. It also introduces Agatha as her polar opposite, who lives in a cemetery and is quick-tempered. It sets up that Sophie would naturally go into Good and Agatha will naturally go into Evil, making it all the more jarring when they are dumped into the opposite schools and cannot be moved. 

Additionally, the author gives thought into making both sides three dimensional, so that Good characters are not always heroes and Evil ones are not always villains. Each side has their flaws, with Good being obsessed with beauty and love, and Evil being rude and antagonistic, even within themselves, reflecting Sophie and Agatha, and keeping the challenges they have to face varied and interesting. All of the side characters are children of famous fairy tale figures, but despite that being common in a lot of books and media, they are distinct from each other and are creative allies and antagonists, and are fully fleshed out characters in their own right. 

This book is the first of six, and a film adaptation is due to be released in 2022. 


The School for Good and Evil (School for Good and Evil, 1): Chainani, Soman, Bruno, Iacopo: Amazon.com: Books

Comments

  1. Maya ViswanathanApril 20, 2021 at 1:48 PM

    I have heard a lot about this book and I want to read it. It sounds really interesting and I like reading fantasy books about magical schools. I like how you mention that the characters are 3 dimensional. I think a lot of books have characters that are black and white and it is really interesting how you say that in this book, even though the characters are supposed to be either good or evil, the characters are more gray. I think that the way the characters can have both good and bad traits while still being opposites and fitting into the descriptions of the heroes and villains in stories is really cool. Great job!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An Introduction to the SCP Wiki (Karl)

    The SCP Wiki is an expansive public creative writing project housed on  scpwiki.com . The SCP Foundation (the Foundation) is a secretive fictional organization inside the SCP universe which contains thousands of people, objects, and places that have anomalous properties. These range from a cardboard box which origami dragons fly out of to a deer god that can turn any matter into a hexagonal column. The anomalies that the Foundation contains, how they are contained, and the stories linked to them are detailed in Special Containment Procedures, which take up the majority of the content on the wiki. Currently, there are six "series" of these procedures, each with a thousand articles.     If you go into a random article on the wiki, you will probably be overwhelmed by acronyms, numbers, and unfamiliar names. There are a few articles that detail what some of these things mean. Useful links are always provided in articles whenever they're mentioned. Object classes...
3 comments
Read more

Why Do Writers Use Pen Names?

By Andrea Li Pen names, also known as a pseudonym, literary double, or nom de plume, are made-up names adopted by an author that they use on their works in place of their real name.  A simple Google search reveals that a surprising amount of well-known authors use pen names, including J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, Lewis Carroll, and Dr. Seuss. Daisy Meadows, from the childhood-favorite and never-ending Rainbow Magic series, is disappointingly a collective pen name for the four different authors that wrote the books (it was too perfect to be true). Then for the opposite effect, you hear the name Rainbow Rowell and are inversely betrayed to hear that Rainbow Rowell, is in fact her real name. The next time you are wondering why famous people all have cool names, the answer is that they might not!  Pen names may seem like a surface level change and simply for aesthetic purposes, but pen names have existed for centuries and have historical significance. In earlier times, when women w...
9 comments
Read more

The Aid of Illustrations to Writing

By Rose Benjamin Illustrations in books, especially novels, can either be useful visual aid or unnecessary. Sometimes, the charm of the story is how the reader can envision the characters and setting themselves. When a character's physical appearance has little do with the story or the mood of the book, vague verbal descriptions (or none at all) are enough. Other times, however, visuals can help set the mood of the story and give characters personality. When the text already provides extensive description or properties of the environment are written to be vague, illustrations break the intent of the text, providing detail that should have been imagined by the reader. Unnecessarily showing how characters look can also ruin the reader's unique experience and make it more similar to everyone else's. People may have in their heads a certain design for a character, and be set on it. An illustration of said character would ruin their perception of the character, especially if the...
4 comments
Read more