The School for Good and Evil - Soman Chainani

I'm going to actually start doing book reviews again, I know that I keep saying this, but I'm going to give it another go. I was on holiday recently, I read actual books, now is the time to try this again.

So, The School for Good and Evil is as it sounds a School where you train to be either a Princess or Princess or the Wicked Witch, or if you don't qualify to that level a side kick or a henchman, every year students turn up excited to learn, already knowing which school they're going to be from and two people come from the forest, kidnapped by the School Master.

For the first half of the book I went through phases of really enjoying it and getting really frustrated with it. Our two protagonists are the Beautiful Sophie and the Ugly Agatha, Sophie wants to be kidnapped because she wants to be a princess and escape her boring normal life, Agatha wants to protect her friend and so ends up getting kidnapped with her, however Sophie ends up in the School for Evil and Agatha ends up in the School for Good. The reason I kept changing my mind about this was because it kept feeling like it was being dealt with n a very black and white way then swapping back again. Black and White as in "you're beautiful, you must be good" and "you're ugly, you must be evil", and every time it started to veer away from that I enjoyed it again, and every time it went back to it I started to get frustrated that it really was going down that route.

Very early on you start to see signs that Agatha is the good one and that Sophie is the evil one, but both girls find it hard to accept, Sophie because she's beautiful and therefore believes that she's good, and Agatha because she's spent all her life being told that she must be evil because of how she looks.

I have to admit that I struggled to like Sophie, in fact I spent quite a lot of time wanting to slap her, mostly because she's a selfish brat, although that is pretty much the point. Within each school with have other characters, of course, we have Tedros, Arthur and Guinevere's son in the school of Good and we have the Sheriff of Nottingham's daughter. I have to admit that I struggled to keep some of the character's straight and to which name went with which character, but I have had that problem a couple of times recently so I'm willing to accept that that might be me rather than the book.

As you get to the final showdown, characters switch sides, page by page, so you never quite know who believes what, so I rushed through the last few chapters in one sitting, and of course I'm not going to tell you how it ends, suffice to say that it's set up the next book nicely and I'm now considering getting the next one to find out what happens next, and I@m still not completely certain whether I'm happy or frustrated by the ending.