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A review by yanners
Rise of the School for Good and Evil by Soman Chainani
1.0
Let’s put this out on the table—this wasn’t good.
What I was expecting: an all-out war pitting Good against Evil, maybe even throw in a school of morally grey, resulting in a centennial of smoldering rivalries and boiling animosity, with forces of Evil ultimately crushing Good and upturning any semblance of fairytale endings we grew up with, in the process crushing the dreams any little girls had in becoming a princess that summons birds and squirrels
What I got: interminable endless torture with an unrelenting migraine like the sort you get from a hangover
Suffice to say I was disappointed. The plot was in shambles because it was ending yet not ending and ending and still not ending. We started off simple with a tale of the two brothers and Aladdin before it spun off into an entire Dune’s worth of developments with sibling betrayal (the most anticlimactic kind) introducing other random players like Hook and Marialena or what’s-its-name and Fala and a whole bunch of people.
The three main characters blossomed into a whole cast just jostling for the limelight that it got really confusing and dreary to read because there were five different POVs scrambling to update me on what I missed while I journeyed with Rafal to the bottom of the ocean, or watched Aladdin become some lovestruck hero sidling up to his girlfriend like no other. That's right, Aladdin had devolved from his debonair thieving ways to become some wish version of a Ken doll. He's besotted with a goody-two-shoes princess who I've never heard of before and was the gayest Disney character there ever was in the first fifty pages. Meanwhile, James Hook is a sniveling coward who tries to be a pirate but fails superbly.
We're occasionally reminded of the Storian with nifty summaries thrown in at the beginning of chapters like "The pen maintains the balance between Good and Evil. Without love, the balance would be disrupted. The pen sent Aladdin to the wrong school as a test for our brotherly love".
I'm chalking this up to a blunder (as most .5 books usually are) because I've already borrowed the next book in the confidence that fantasy would never let me down no matter what.
Well it did.
1.5 stars
What I was expecting: an all-out war pitting Good against Evil, maybe even throw in a school of morally grey, resulting in a centennial of smoldering rivalries and boiling animosity, with forces of Evil ultimately crushing Good and upturning any semblance of fairytale endings we grew up with, in the process crushing the dreams any little girls had in becoming a princess that summons birds and squirrels
What I got: interminable endless torture with an unrelenting migraine like the sort you get from a hangover
Suffice to say I was disappointed. The plot was in shambles because it was ending yet not ending and ending and still not ending. We started off simple with a tale of the two brothers and Aladdin before it spun off into an entire Dune’s worth of developments with sibling betrayal (the most anticlimactic kind) introducing other random players like Hook and Marialena or what’s-its-name and Fala and a whole bunch of people.
The three main characters blossomed into a whole cast just jostling for the limelight that it got really confusing and dreary to read because there were five different POVs scrambling to update me on what I missed while I journeyed with Rafal to the bottom of the ocean, or watched Aladdin become some lovestruck hero sidling up to his girlfriend like no other. That's right, Aladdin had devolved from his debonair thieving ways to become some wish version of a Ken doll. He's besotted with a goody-two-shoes princess who I've never heard of before and was the gayest Disney character there ever was in the first fifty pages. Meanwhile, James Hook is a sniveling coward who tries to be a pirate but fails superbly.
We're occasionally reminded of the Storian with nifty summaries thrown in at the beginning of chapters like "The pen maintains the balance between Good and Evil. Without love, the balance would be disrupted. The pen sent Aladdin to the wrong school as a test for our brotherly love".
I'm chalking this up to a blunder (as most .5 books usually are) because I've already borrowed the next book in the confidence that fantasy would never let me down no matter what.
Well it did.
1.5 stars