Reviews with content warning for Child abuse - The School for Good and Evil

Reviews tagging 'Child abuse'

The School for Good and Evil by Soman Chainani

7 reviews

ailsaod's review against another edition

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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saskiajva's review against another edition

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adventurous lighthearted medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.25

This book started so strong and I really loved almost every single part of it. The plot is cute, creative, and unexpected.

One central theme of this book revolves around how your actions are what make you beautiful/ugly, and not vice versa, which I loved, but I felt like there could have been some improvement to how that theme was executed. Specifically once the characters started physically changing appearance in correlation to their actions, it almost had the exact opposite message

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chrisljm's review against another edition

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adventurous medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.5

I know a lot of the stereotypes presented in the book are based on tropes often seen in fairytales, but when you spend all 500 pages reenforcing them instead of showing how good and bad people can’t just be categorized into archetypes, it just becomes sexist, fatphobic, and a bunch of other problematic shit. I just don’t understand what exactly was the author’s goal – whether to dismantle or reaffirm fairytale tropes, because it comes off as reaffirming them.

The romance also doesn’t make sense. I know romances between princes and princesses are also part of fairytale tropes, but they were definitely trying to force something real between Agatha and Tedros, and there was just no chemistry at all. Like the only thing that drew him to Agatha during the tests was a “feeling”, and after realizing that she’s good and not a liar, he’s in love with her all of a sudden? Ok. The characters, as well as the story, were very two-dimensional and had no growth, and the ending felt rushed.

I also want to add on that Sophie and Agatha are supposed to be best friends but not only was Sophie a shit person, but she was also a shit friend. Readers are provided plenty of context on why Sophie is perfect for the School of Evil, but we don’t see any good memories between Sophie and Agatha that show why they’re friends with each other. Instead, you see Sophie barge her way to Agatha’s house regularly to build good credit, give her nasty cookies, and call her ugly.

The book felt long and tedious to get through because 1. we saw way too much of Sophie’s POV, especially for how insufferable and unselfaware she is. 2. Agatha just gets manipulated over and over and over again. ENOUGH.

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rumireads's review against another edition

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dark funny

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.75

I haven't encountered a book so viciously fatphobic in at least a decade
the way it sexualised 12 year olds is absolutely disgusting (I can see why they aged the characters up for the movie)
weirdly homophobic as well. kids calling each other gay as an insult might be accurate but it's certainly not something that I'd like to model for them??
I think this author has a reeeealy poor opinion of women

please don't give/recommend this series to the youths, it's genuinely awful towards most kinds of people

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