A review by ailsaod
The School for Good and Evil by Soman Chainani

adventurous emotional hopeful slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

 I read this book because I saw some clips of the show and thought it looked interesting. I thought there was opportunity for some interesting trope subversions but this book is trying too hard to subversive and ends up contradicting its own message.

At the beginning I was quite excited because I thought Sophie and Agatha were an interesting contrast with internal vs external goodness. Agatha is the village weird kid but is very kind but rather asocial while Sophie is externally very pretty and tries to be nice but is such a mean girl that it is actually quite nasty. There is a random comment saying that Agatha dressed up as a bride for Halloween once because marriage scares her and I thought that was the best (and funniest) thing! This exciting beginning is over rather quickly though as we then head to the school and the book begins to get tangled up in its own themes.

I think the author was going for the angle that there is more to being a good person than being a knight if you are a boy or a damsel in distress if you are a girl and that the gender roles that we see played out in so many fairy tales are restrictive but this didn't really come through. The story points out these things but never quite gets to the point of saying what it will do instead so I'm left with the final impression that the 'moral of the story' is that everyone sucks but that's ok if you are beautiful and can't wait to get married to the first boy to acknowledge your existence like a good little air-headed princess. In fact if you aren't frothing at the mouth at the thought of dating boys and being vapid then you must be evil! Yea no thank you. We even head into the territory of external appearance being determined by your morality in the climax of the book which I guess is in fitting with the fairy tale setting but not a great mindset to have nowadays when this logic says that everyone who isn't conventionally attractive and living a heteronormative lifestyle is a bad person.

On another note the "friendship" between Agatha and Sophie was extremely tedious. They have the communication skills of characters in a shoujo romance anime and are stuck in a continuous cycle of falling out, almost making up and then falling out over something different. I honestly don't understand why Agatha is always willing to go so far out of her way for Sophie when Sophie will never even thank her and always blames her for EVERYTHING. Who needs enemies when you can have friends like this!?
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