The School for Good and Evil by Soman Chainani

The School for Good and Evil 
by Soman Chainani

Published by: HarperCollins Publishers 
Publication Date: May 14, 2013

Format: ebook
Copyright: 2014
Pages: 512
Genre: Middle-Grade Fiction - Fairytale retelling
Source: own book

From Amazon:
At the School for Good and Evil, failing your fairy tale is not an option. 

Welcome to the School for Good and Evil, where best friends Sophie and Agatha are about to embark on the adventure of a lifetime. With her glass slippers and devotion to good deeds, Sophie knows she'll earn top marks at the School for Good and join the ranks of past students like Cinderella, Rapunzel, and Snow White. 
Meanwhile, Agatha, with her shapeless black frocks and wicked black cat, seems a natural fit for the villains in the School for Evil. 

The two girls soon 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 among 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 . . . ? The School for Good and Evil is an epic journey into a dazzling new world, where the only way out of a fairy tale is to live through one.


All I can say is good grief what a load of dingo's kidneys.

Fair warning, this might get a bit spoilery because this book just ticked me off so much. I am going to try and avoid giving away too much but I might let some things slip.

I have had this book shoved to my attention for what feels like ages, so when I saw it on sale at Amazon for $1.99, I finally decided to give it a go. I like fairy tale retellings and the premise sounded somewhat promising.

Turns out I should have given it a pass. Ugh what a wet mess.  The idea that the "ugly" girl is the good one and the "beautiful" girl is the evil one is not exactly groundbreaking here but has been treated as something amazingly subversive and trope upending by lots of reviewers out there. Okay - I was willing to give it a chance, considering much of the stuff that gets published, this sounded like it was at least going to be a chance of pace.

Turns out to be a throughly shallow treatment though because as the story progresses, 'good' girls get prettier and 'evil' girls get uglier - so much for that subversive idea. And for some reason the whole Evil School is populated by the unwashed, unkempt and imperfect, because clearly that all equals evil, right? Excuse me?  Some of the best fairy tale villains were quite beautiful or handsome. What the heck does lack of traditional beauty or inability to blend in with peers have to do with evil?

Someone failed Shakespeare - That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain 
                                                            — Hamlet Act 1, scene 5

The book gives lip service to the idea that actions speak louder than appearances, but doesn't actually make that happen in the plot. Not to mention the fact that the whole 'I want to be an evil villain just because!' thing has never made sense to me. There are some stabs at explaining motivations but they mostly fall flat because the worldbuilding is so nonsensical.

More Shakespeare !

I had rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in his grace,

and it better fits my blood to be disdained of all than to

fashion a carriage to rob love from any. In this, though I

cannot be said to be a flattering honest man, it must not be

denied but I am a plain-dealing villain. I am trusted with a

muzzle and enfranchised with a clog; therefore I have

decreed not to sing in my cage. If I had my mouth, I would

bite; if I had my liberty, I would do my liking. In the

meantime, let me be that I am, and seek not to alter me.

                                    — Much Ado About Nothing Act 1, scene 3


I completely hated the whole your soul is either all evil or all good - you were born that way - and there isn't anything you can do about it.  I managed to swallow it down and hope that this was going to be blown apart in the course of the story.

Speaking of inexplicable - apparently murder is common, right since it is common in fairy tales, but only the truly evil can be murders, so really murdering someone is too evil, except at the beginning of the book, and multiple times throughout actually, her roommates threaten, plan, attempt to murder Sophie. Then later in the book they act all shocked about the idea of murder. And someone does actually commit a murder but the only consequences are occasional feelings of nausea. Wait, what ?

And this kind of thing is true throughout the book. Every characters actions and motivations are whatever they need to be at that point in the narrative, never mind the fact that they were completely different just a few pages or even paragraphs ago.

The book starts out promisingly, laying out threads that could have gone somewhere - like perhaps the critical idea that the world isn't totally black and white, and really following through with the ugly does not equal evil. There were lots of ways that this could have been a really good book. It bailed on every single one of them. Sigh.

And the ending! ARGH! Mass slaughter but hey, everything is okay for 'our hero' so that equals 'happy ending' (such as it ended - it was pretty abrupt for such a long, wordy and repetitive book.)

However - at the very end of the book the way that the internal fairy tale ended, the trigger, I really liked that idea. Too bad it was tied up with the extremely harmful idea that good is always required to forgive - no matter how badly someone else has treated them or others - no matter how terrible someone else is. That is a recipe for abuse right there. 

And the writing was occasionally a bit of a train wreck. There were several places where I re-read sections of text that jumped from point A to point B like something critical and revealing had happened, but there was nothing connecting them. Either the ebook version is missing chunks of text or this book needed a much better editor.

Stuff like this (there are worse examples but they are all spoilers) ...

"The west doors flew open to sixty gorgeous boys in swordfight. 

Sun-kissed skin peeked through light blue sleeves and stiff collars; tall navy boots matched high-cut waistcoats and knotted slim ties, each embroidered with a single gold initial."

I flipped back and forth several times trying to find the rest of that first sentence. Just huh?

Sigh. No fun. No fun at all. I certainly am not interested in the second book and don't get why this one was so popular at all.

A peak into The Seventh Bride and The Quiet World

For this week's Book Beginnings on Friday, hosted by Rose City Reader here is the start of the novella The Seventh Bride by T. Kingfisher (aka Ursula Vernon)

Her name was Rhea. 

Her father said that she had been named after a great and powerful goddess of the old days, the queen of all the gods, but in that country at that time, there weren't many books about gods. There were too many problems with wizards and fairies and odd things popping up in the corners of the potato field for anyone to want to invite more supernatural intervention.


Just FYI: Rhea was the Titan goddess of fertility and motherhood, described as "the supreme goddess" and "mother of all gods and men." She was the daughter of Uranus and Gaea and was married to her brother Cronus - the one who kept swallowing all his children until Rhea managed to hide her last child Zeus and give Cronus a rock, wrapped in a blanket, to swallow instead.

For non-fiction, since there is a couple of feet of snow out there, here is the start to The Quiet World: Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom 1879-1960 by Douglas Brinkley ...

Young Theodore Roosevelt could barely believe his good fortune. Taking a long break from studying for his Harvard University entrance exams in Manhattan, he headed to Long Island for an outdoor ramble in the calming woods. A dedicated birder, the seventeen year-old Roosevelt was hoping to add a couple of new species to his growing North American list. Suddenly, Roosevelt heard a faint barking hoot and looked up.

---

For The Friday 56 hosted at Freda's Voice something from the 56% mark of The Seventh Bride ...

She shoved her hands in her pockets. The hedgehog prickled against her fingers. 

"Do you want me to put you down?" she asked. "I'm about to do something very stupid." 

The hedgehog turned a bright eye up towards her and shrugged, as if to indicate that perhaps it was the time for very stupid acts. 

{anything more would be a spoiler.}

And from The Quiet World page 56:

The Chugach National Forest – a subpolar rain forest – was perhaps Roosevelt's most ambitious move with regard to conservation. Throughout the Chugach Mountains, which provided Anchorage with an ideal natural backdrop, rivers and creeks interlaced with snowfields, salmon wove their way the Gulf of Alaska, wolverines (Gulo gulo) and bears were on the prowl, and explorers could easily get lost in whipping mists and rain squalls. Geographic features were named after animals: for example, Ptarmigan Lake and Caribou Creek. (All around the Kenai Peninsula, there were natural features eventually named after former U.S. presidents, such as Harding Icefield and Grant Lake.) Overnight the Chugach became the northernmost addition to the portfolio of the U.S. Forest Service; there were many gurgling creeks and milky blue-green rivers that nobody had yet named. All along Resurrection Creek, however, could be found the scars of mining. Heaped-up cobble and gravel marred the riverbeds.

Happy Friday!

The Seventh Bride by T. Kingfisher

The Seventh Bride
by T. Kingfisher (aka Ursula Vernon)

Publisher: Red Wombat Tea Company
Format: ebook
Published: November 11, 2014
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
Print Length: 183 pages

Genre: Fiction - Fairy Tale/Horror
Source: purchased

From the T Kingfisher website:

Rhea is an ordinary miller’s daughter, engaged to be married under suspicious circumstances to a man not of her choosing. 

He has unknown powers and a manor house full of mysterious women. 

Rhea has a hedgehog. It claims to be ordinary, but normal hedgehogs don’t act like that.

It’s probably not going to be enough.

Sigh. I am such an Ursula Vernon fangirl that I would probably read her grocery list and like it. Somehow I missed this one when it came out - probably because I was focused on waiting for Dragonbreath: Knight-Napped! which (squee!) is sitting on the desk next to me.  I have to read it at lunch becuase as soon as I take it home my son is going to steal it to read. 

So - I have to admit that I think I liked Nine Goblins a bit better, but still - this is pretty cool. It is an interesting take on the Bluebeard idea, where Rhea finds herself 'engaged' to an off-putting Lord. Rhea, our narrator, has a good, strong, young-girl-in-over-her-head voice. She might be a little slow to pick up some of the clues being laid out, but not unbearably so. She also tends to admit that she should have seen something coming - and it makes sense in a I still can't believe/cope with the things that are happening around me sort of way.

The story is Coraline-ish level creepy - not for children but should be find for older teens. 

There are a few lines that I absolutely adored - mostly involving the hedgehog, because hedgehogs are awesome - but I am going to refrain from sharing them because I want to encourage everyone to go try this one themselves. Well worth your time. 

It is only available as an ebook

Amazon  |  iBooks  |  Barnes & Noble  |  Smashwords  |  Kobo

The Hedgehog's Balloon by Ursula Vernon
http://www.redwombatstudio.com/product/the-hedgehogs-balloon/

This hedgehog has nothing to do with the story - it is just an example of some of Ursula Vernon's wonderful art.

But now, just because I have to ...

 Hedgehog squeeeeee !

'kay I am better now,

Wondrous Words Wednesday 37

Wondrous Words Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Kathy at the Bermuda Onion where you "can share new words that you’ve encountered or spotlight words you love. Feel free to get creative!"

I am totally in a -12 degree wind chill outside, everything is blah, funk. But - words are fun! So in an attempt to cheer myself up, here are a few words - mostly from books that I thought were pretty meh, which doesn't help - that I thought were interesting ...

hobbledehoy /ˈhäbəldēˌhoi/
1 noun: an awkward gawky youth - usually referencing a young man or boy.

1 adjective: awkward or clumsy.

Origin: unknown OR variant of hoberdyhoy, alliterative compound, equivalent to hoberd (variant of Roberd Robert) +  -hoy for boy
First Known Use: 1530 - 1540

---

beldam \ˈbel-dəm\

1:  an old woman 

an old woman, esp an ugly or malicious one; hag

 --- witch, crone, hag  

2: [Obsolete] grandmother. 

 

Orgin: Middle English beldam grandmother, from Anglo-French bel beautiful + Middle English dam

First Known Use: 1520

Wait, what??? this word went from standing for grandmother to standing for witch or hag???  What happened?  The original construction is beautiful woman - what the heck is the etymology of this word?  

"aged woman," 1570s; earlier "grandmother" (mid-15c.), from dame (q.v.) in the sense of "mother" + bel-, Middle English prefix expressing relationship (cf. belfader, belsire "grandfather"), from Old French bel, belle "beautiful, fair, fine" (see belle ). This "direct relationship" sense of bel is not found in French, where the prefix is used to form words for in-laws.

I will try to sort this out later.  Sheesh!
 

---

jobbernoll
1: The head; the pate.
2: A stupid fellow; a loggerhead; a blockhead.[Vulgar in both senses] 
from The Century Dictionary: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language, Part 11
 edited by William Dwight Whitney
From A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, In its several Tribes of Gypsies, Beggers, Thieves, Cheats, &c. with An Addition of some Proverbs, Phrases, Figurative Speeches, &c. Useful for all sorts of People, (especially Foreigners) to secure their Money and preserve their Lives; besides very Diverting and Entertaining, being wholly New by  which was published in London in 1699

 a "jobbernoll" means "a very silly Fellow."

" Calf," meaning a fool (as witness Cotgraves definition of " Veau, a calfe or veale ; also alozell, hoydon, dunce, jobbernoll, doddipole" from Elizabethan England..

(this one was tough because the Jobberknoll from Harry Potter has almost driven out the original word!) 

---

vingt-et-un \ˌvan-ˌtā-ˈən\

:  blackjack

Origin: French, literally, twenty-one (Well duh!  I clearly didn't think that one through.)

First Known Use: 1772

---

 
bag·wig \ˈbag-ˌwig\

:  an 18th century wig with the back hair enclosed in a small silk bag 

First Known Use : 1717

Gentleman's Queue Bag
18th Century
Gentlemen wore a queue bag to "contain the pony tail" 

of their own hair or a wig to keep their collars and clothes clean.
Silk, linen. W 12.1, L 25.4 cm
Morristown National Historic Park, MORR 3932

Sounds hideously uncomfortable!

---

gadroon /ɡəˈdro͞on /

1:  the ornamental notching or carving of a rounded molding

2:  a short often oval fluting or reeding used in decoration

— gadroon transitive verb

— ga·droon·ing noun

 : noun A decorative edging on metal or wood, typically formed by inverted flutings.
Origin late 17th century: from French godron, probably related to goder 'to pucker', also to godet.

American railroad holloware creamer jug with
gadrooning on the lower body (Wikipedia)

 

Happy Wednesday! Stay Warm !

Waistcoats and Weaponry by Gail Garriger

Waistcoats and Weaponry
Finishing School Book the Third
by Gail Carriger

Published:  Little Brown and Company, Hachette Book Group
Format: Hardback
Copyright: 2014
Pages: 298
Genre: Fiction - Steampunkish
Source: own book

From the cover:

Class is back in session. Sophronia continues finishing school in style – with a steel-bladed fan secreted in the folds of her ball gown, of course. Such a fashionable choice of weapon comes in handy when Sophronia, her best friend Dimity, sweet sootie Soup, and the charming Lord Felix Mersey hijack a suspiciously empty train to return their chum Sidheag to her werewolf pack in Scotland. But when Sophronia discovers they are being trailed by a dirigible of Picklemen and flywaymen, she unearths a plot that threatens to throw all of London into chaos. With her friends in mortal danger, Sophronia must sacrifice what she holds most dear – [Oh good grief what a pack of drivel! I didn't read this before I read the book and I am sorry to have now.]

Obviously if you haven't read the first two books, you can't start with this one. And if you have been reading these books, and enjoying them, you don't need the silly description on the cover to want to pick it up. I loved the first book, liked the second, and was really, really looking forward to reading this installment. I snapped up a copy as soon as I saw it in the bookstore. 

Now that I have finished the book, I am not quite sure what to say. For this most part, I found this installment pretty disappointing. The complaint that I had about the last book Curtsies & Conspiracies concerning the developing love triangle - well that stuff was amped up to ten this time. I was bored out of my skull by 'relationship drama' stuff when I was in high school and I find it pretty darn boring now too. Especially as it was not handled in a way that felt real or interesting. However, I can live with it, as long as there is something else going on plot-wise, but in this book the plot took forever to get going. Things didn't really get into swing until the last quarter of the book. The overarching plot didn't actually develop much more from the state of things in the previous book (we see where the whole prototypes and how they could be used thing spelled out in capital letters this time). The questions I had about how vampires work in the world from the last book didn't get answered. In fact, for the most part, there was very little world building going on. 

As for the ending. Well - it was unexpected. I will give it that. I don't know - I was kind of, hum, that was kind of out of the blue. Plus - I am not one of those people who think vampires or werewolves are sexy. Sorry.

I am not nearly as excited about the next book. Sigh.