Book 1 of The School for Good and Evil series
Summary
Sophie and Agatha are definitely the most unlikely of friends. Sophie is fair and beautiful and Agatha is rude and everyone makes it known how ugly she is. These two girls live in the little village of Gavaldon where, every four years, two children are taken. One Good child and one Bad child. Everyone knows that Agatha and Sophie are the most likely targets for the School Master to choose to kidnap.
Sophie, unlike other children in her village, dreams of going off to the school where she'll learn to be a princess. She goes through the motions of being the most beautiful and the kindest girl in all of Gavaldon. She knows for sure she'll be picked. Agatho on the other hand wants nothing to do with the stories and would rather stay in her home in the graveyard and be with her cat. Agatha didn't get her wish, though.
The night of the kidnapping both girls are taken and brought to the Schools for Good and Evil, as expected, and they had no chance of going home. The one thing they didn't expect, though, is Agatha being dropped at the School for Good and Sophie being dropped at the School for Evil... (queue dramatic music)
What are these girls supposed to do with this new development in their little story? Sophie is going to do whatever it takes to get to the School for Good and Agatha will do whatever it takes to get home with Sophie, her only true friend. Will they be able to achieve their goals, however contradicting they are? Will, they even survive the tale they're being thrown into?
Opinion
Scale of 1-10:
8
Alright, so this book is definitely a solid 8. While I definitely enjoy the story and the sheer uniqueness it brought when it comes to fairytales, for which I believe it's very hard to be unique with that genre of stories, the writing style just didn't grip me as much as I wanted it to. It wasn't until about halfway to 3/4 of the book that I got really invested and interested in what was happening. I don't know if I just had to get used to Soman Chainani's writing or what, but it did get better.
I also felt like certain aspects of the story changed on a dime. Like Sophie's character would be rotting in despair one second, and then the next page she was super upbeat and ready to take on the world. Again, this got A LOT better as I got through the book.
I feel the need to point out that this is an insanely unique book compared to other fairytale-based books. There are a lot of aspects of fairytales that are overplayed and just boring at this point. But somehow, the author managed to take some of the classic fairytale things, and turn them into his own unique story for Agatha and Sophie, which I would imagine is a hard thing to do when writing about fairytales. I definitely appreciate that about this book and its author.
One thing I thoroughly enjoyed about this story is Agatha's character arc. There is one point where her realizations about herself just honestly took my breath away and I adored it! Whenever the story was from her POV, I was the most interested. I got kind of bored at first with Sophie's POV up until later. Agatha just had this sarcastic sense of humor and I love how she just looked at some of the more spoiled princesses like they were the craziest things in the world. It honestly made me laugh a couple of times.
The final thing I'll leave you with about this book is this: It gets better as you keep reading. By the time I was halfway through it, I didn't really want to put it down. It's not the type of book where if I wouldn't be able to focus on anything else if I stopped reading it, but I also still really wanted to see how stuff panned out in the story. Does that make sense? Probably not but that's okay. I'm used to not making sense when it comes to talking about books ;-)
Age Rating
10-11+
This is an incredibly appropriate book for this age range. If you have a child that's like nine or something and they have a higher reading level, then they would like this book too!
Language:
There is only one word said once in the whole book and that word is "ass". Other than that, completely clean.
Sexual Content:
There is a couple of kissing scenes and they don't go into detail. There's also some flirting between characters. There really isn't a lot of sexual content.
Violence:
There are multiple scenes of fighting. There are monsters and other creatures that attack students and the students get injured. Injuries aren't too graphically described other than stated where they're bleeding from. There are a couple of unappealing images described when talking about certain things from the School for Evil. and there's just more gross than violent.
Here's the link to the book on Goodreads:
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