The School for Good and Evil (2013)
Monday, March 23, 2015
Title : The School for Good and Evil
Author : Soman Chainani
Genre : Fantasy
Score : 7.1/10
At the School for Good and Evil, failing
your fairy tale is not an option.
Welcome to the School for Good and Evil,
where best friends Sophie and Agatha are about to embark on the adventure of a
lifetime.
With her glass slippers and devotion to good
deeds, Sophie knows she’ll earn top marks at the School for Good and join the
ranks of past students like Cinderella, Rapunzel, and Snow White. Meanwhile,
Agatha, with her shapeless black frocks and wicked black cat, seems a natural
fit for the villains in the School for Evil.
The two girls soon find their fortunes
reversed – Sophie’s dumped in the School for Evil to take Uglification, Death
Curses, and Henchmen Training, while Agatha finds herself in the School for
Good, thrust among handsom princes and fair maidens for classes in the Princess
Etiquette and Animal Communication.
But what if the mistake is actually the
first clue to discovering who Sophie and Agatha really are . . . ?
The School for Good and Evil is an epic
journey into a dazzling new world, where the only way out of a fairy tale is to
live through one.
This is the kind of new concept
of a fairy tale. It’s not all about the romance and the heroes, but more about
friendship between the hero and the villain. I find this concept is refreshing
since most of fairy tale we’ve read is all about romance and the hero against
the villain, i.e Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, you named it. But
what if the hero turn out to save the villain? The School for Good and Evil will tell you the story.
Soman Chainani played my emotion
by showing the story with Sophie’s point of view and Agatha’s point of view. At
first, I expected the book will be all about Sophie as the story begins with
Sophie’s point of view, but then as I turned the page into the last, I finally
realized that the book is more about Agatha, since my heart moved to Agatha’s
side. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t like Sophie’s charracter. I also liked
Sophie because she can make me feel pity about her, but then, Sophie’s
charracter can make me hate her again as if I can feel Agatha’s feeling when
she betrayed her.
The book is 496 pages, I think
it’s very long for a fairy tale and can really make someone, who isn’t patient
enough, become bored. More over, some parts of its long story aren’t important
enough to give impact to the main plot. The humor then doesn’t work really well
since I’m not amused by most humor in this book.
But, then, the author can enough
repair her mistakes by giving a well done work at the ending. The ending its
self have an unusual ending a fairy tale commonly has. But not good enough till
it leave any mark, any curiousity in my mind, wanting the story to continue.
And for that good ending and for the new concept of the fairy tale, I give this
book 7.1/10. After all, this book is worth it to read since I stayed all night
during my mid-exam, curious about what will happened next as I moved on to next
page until I reached ‘The End’.
***
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