Azu is Reading — The School for Good and Evil #1 by Soman Chainani
The first kidnappings happened two hundred years before. Some years it was two boys taken, some years two girls, sometimes one of each. But if at first the choices seemed random, soon the pattern became clear. One was always beautiful and good, the child every parent wanted as their own. The other was homely and odd, an outcast from birth. An opposing pair, plucked from youth and spirited away.
This year, best friends Sophie and Agatha are about to discover where all the lost children go: the fabled School for Good & Evil, where ordinary boys and girls are trained to be fairy tale heroes and villains. As the most beautiful girl in Gavaldon, Sophie has dreamed of being kidnapped into an enchanted world her whole life. With her pink dresses, glass slippers, and devotion to good deeds, she knows she’ll earn top marks at the School for Good and graduate a storybook princess. Meanwhile Agatha, with her shapeless black frocks, wicked pet cat, and dislike of nearly everyone, seems a natural fit for the School for Evil.
But when the two girls are swept into the Endless Woods, they 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 amongst handsome princes and fair maidens for classes in Princess Etiquette and Animal Communication. But what if the mistake is actually the first clue to discovering who Sophie and Agatha really are…?
Review
Don’t take it too seriously and you will not suffer much. Before I started reading, I did something I don’t do often: I read other reviews, and thought they were kind of contradictory with people loving it and a lot of people that didn’t, but it also helped me to do exactly that: not take this story too close to heart.
It helped me to just read something without any other purpose than to read. It’s awful and ridiculous and incredibly weird in a lot of parts, but I let the weirdness be and just read.
This was a journey I made with my best friend, and to me, it was easy to connect with Agatha, we were… similar in some kind of ways. My best friend was Sophie, so we crashed into a lot of arguments about what this is fair, what this is unfair, what this shouldn’t be that way, before I reached the enlightenment view of just don’t do it. We weren’t Sophie and Agatha, though being on opposite sides was sort of fun. I don’t see myself as Good, but I will not survive in the School of Evil. She’s not pure Evil, but she will love to attend the School of Good.
Well, it can be annoying, and have no sense, and have sense, and follow no kind of physics law, and grow overly depicting in the wrong things and bizarre for a lot of parts, but I suppose that its charm. It’s outside of the usual kind of fairy tales, so if you don’t want anything going weird, then save it and read something else. But I believe you should be the one doing your call, try it yourself. You can leave the journey at any point anyway.
