I read this book many years ago when it came out but just recently picked it back up again after reading the author's fairytale retelling anthology. I plan to finish the entire series this time. Eventually. I need to switch genres in between books sometimes.
SGaE has a simple premise. Kids are taken I think every four years to go to The School for Good and Evil. These children will then be in future fairy tales. The Good ones will be the princes, princesses, animal helpers, etc. The Evil will play the villains and henchmen.
Sophie, the blonde on the cover there, feels destined to be a princess. She befriends Agatha as a Good Deed, but eventually the two actually become friends. Sophie is exactly what you'd think: blonde, likes pink, obsessed with beauty and finding a prince. Agatha lives in a cemetery and has definite goth tendencies.
Agatha doesn't really believe in the school so she tries to save Sophie when the "School Master" comes to town to make his selections. Sophie and Agatha's mom are both pleased because they think Agatha was destined to go to the Evil school.
Welp. Wrong.
Sophie ends up in Evil. Agatha in Good.
The book is quite long and I think a bit overcomplicated. They spend chapter after chapter coming up with new plots and then going back to something else. Agatha just wants to go home. Sophie is determined to switch their places and stay in the school, especially after meeting the most wanted prince in school.
Agatha works toward revealing the school's secrets. She and Sophie are both Readers. They're from a town (possibly the only town?) outside the woods that surround the school. The other characters are all descendants of fairy tale characters that come from various places in their fairy tale-centric world. In an attempt to go home, Agatha and Sophie go see the School Master and inadvertently begin the writing of their own fairy tale, which means they can't just go home.
Sophie tries to be Good but ends up excelling at some of her Evil classes. She flip flops for the entire book between trying to be her Good princess self and embracing her Evil self. Agatha, who eventually gets better at her Good classes, has to help Sophie at one point because she's fallen behind in class, too busy coming up with new Evil outfits and training the other Evil students in some proper hygiene and other behaviors.
Agatha excels at both Good and Evil but is constantly burdened because she doesn't look like a princess. There's a scene where the dean of the school, who's the fairy godmother from Cinderella, tricks her into thinking she magically gave Agatha a makeover. Agatha then walks the halls smiling and being nice to people and they respond in shock and in positive ways. Then she gets to a mirror and realizes she still looks the same. Agatha is very confusing because she's described as having greasy helmet hair and "bug eyes" but in this scene, it's like "Oh, I've been beautiful all along." Well, which is it? It does mention later that she washes her hair more often, but you can spend the majority of a book saying she's ugly and then suddenly says she's beautiful. You could say SHE thought she was ugly but the responses of the other students and their bullying clearly state it's not just in Agatha's head. So that whole beautiful all along thing feels like a cop out.
In the end, both girls embrace playing their respective roles and then come to realize they're not Good OR Evil. People can be both. They defeat the villain, completely change the school...and then vanish back to their home, leaving chaos and a sad prince behind.
There is a truly impressive amount of world-building in this book but as I mentioned, it is pretty long and some of it gets repetitive. How many times can we see Agatha bullied? How many times will she go back to helping Sophie after Sophie's treated her like shit? How many times will Sophie flip flop between sides? There is some truly great stuff in here and it hooks you right in, but by the end, I wanted to just get to the conflict resolution already. Probably a few events could be removed and the book would read the same. But the characters are likeable, I do like the world the author has built, and I want to read more.
In a side note, there is going to be a Netflix adaptation of this and I am truly appalled at the casting decisions. One of the main points of the book is that the Evil students are ugly. So what did they do? They cast a bunch of white characters with black actors...in the Evil roles. Including AGATHA, the most often called ugly character in the book. I think the only racebent character on the Good side was the dean. Diversity is nice but they should have taken the most beautiful girl in the Good school and cast a black actress there. Nope. She's still white and blonde, as is Sophie. Oh, and they joined the list of movie adaptations that do albino erasure. It's all so problematic and disgusting. I don't even know if I can watch it.
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