100 pages • 3 hours read
Soman ChainaniThe School For Good and Evil
Soman ChainaniFiction | Novel | Middle GradeA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Background
Literary Context: Fairy Tale Retellings for Modern Audiences
The School for Good and Evil was written and published in a time of fairy-tale retellings: A proliferation of authors began to examine the fairy tales of the past and rewrite them for a modern audience. Fairy tales are typically written for children, but 21st-century authors explore the messages old fairy tales communicate and question the assumptions they make. Modern fairy-tale retellings interrogate the original tales in relation to gender roles, morals, black-and-white conceptions of good and evil, and the role of relationships and friendships. Using these considerations to probe deeper into original fairy tales allows authors to reimagine fairy tales for a modern audience, keeping the magic of the original while making the messages relevant for modern audiences.
The School for Good and Evil utilizes many fairy-tale tropes, especially the idea of Good and Evil in fairy tales. The paperback edition of the book includes an interview with Soman Chainani about his motivations for writing the novel. He said:
In recent years, fairy-tale mash-ups, retellings, and revisions have become popular—and for good reason, given how enduring and inspiring the source material is. That said, I had my sights set on something more primal: a new fairy tale, just as unleashed and unhinged as the old, that found the anxieties of today’s children. To acknowledge the past—the alumni of the genre, so to speak—and move on to a new class (“Extras” 8-9).
Chainani pays homage to traditional fairy tales such as “Cinderella,” “Jack and the Beanstalk,” and “Hansel and Gretel,” but his new fairy tale is focused more on playing with such tropes as Good and Evil and true love’s kiss.
Readers are familiar with how Good and Evil are presented in original fairy tales in which Good always wins, and heroes and villains are clearly identified. But in his modern tale, Chainani forces the question of whether good and evil are as clear-cut as fairy tales want to make readers believe by having Sophie and Agatha placed in the seemingly wrong schools. These characters provoke a reconsideration of the ideas of good and evil and how fairy tales shape them. Chainani also plays with the idea of true love’s kiss, which in fairy tales is very powerful and usually happens between a prince and a princess. In Chainani’s tale, true love includes not only romantic love but also friendship love. The fairy tale tropes and traditions lend the narrative of The School for Good and Evil a sense of familiarity, but the ways that Chainani uses them make the novel a new fairy tale for a new generation.
Cultural Context: Netflix Film Adaptation
In October 2022, Netflix released a film adaptation of The School for Good and Evil with stars such as Charlize Theron, Kerry Washington, and Laurence Fishburne leading the film. The film adaptation follows many of the main themes of the novel but diverges from it in scope and characterization. The director’s goal was to pay homage to the novel and its world but use the changes to make the film version feel different and surprise and delight readers. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, director Paul Feig said:
You take the things that the audience, the readers, and the fans love from the books and then you retrofit them in a way to still make it your own but in a way that they're going to be happy. You're also going to have an audience who doesn't know the books or an audience who's just experiencing it without having to know the material—I'm very against any movies where you have to know things before you go there (Bucksbaum, Sydney. “School for Good and Evil Director Paul Feig Teases Potential Sequel.” Entertainment Weekly, 21 Oct. 2022).
Feig’s cinematic world feels familiar to readers of the book, but the changes to the story facilitate its adaption for the screen. For example, the Evil Brother’s presence in the movie is more prevalent, and challenges like the Trial of Tales and the Circus of Talents are changed to fit a more limited screen time. New characters are added, such as Gregory, who functions similarly to the gargoyle character in the novel. Many of the professors in the book are not present in the adaptation, and some characters, such as Hort, have a bigger role than in the novel. Others, including Hester, are featured more in the novel than in the film. However, the storyline shares the source material’s emphasis on the importance of friendship and the danger of judging good and evil based on appearance.
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