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.
Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Princess and The Witch”
It’s the 11th day of the 11th month of the 4th year, which means that the School Master is coming that night to kidnap two children, one good and one evil, and take them to the School for Good and Evil, where they will graduate into a fairy tale.
Sophie, a young Gavaldonian girl, dreams of choosing a handsome prince out of a line of other princes, finally finding someone she feels is worthy of her. Unlike the rest of the people in town, who want to avoid attracting attention, Sophie wakes, puts on a pink dress, and goes to do good deeds to get noticed by the School Master. Meanwhile, the townspeople, including Sophie’s father, anxiously board up the town to ensure the School Master won’t kidnap their children.
On her way to Agatha’s house, a boy named Radley interrupts Sophie’s reverie about her good deeds. Sophie snaps at him, but she decides the School Master will understand her outburst because she is beautiful, and Radley is ugly. Sophie approaches Agatha’s house in the cemetery, and Agatha reluctantly agrees to go on a walk.
While Agatha doesn’t believe in fairy tales or the School Master, Sophie argues that Agatha’s scared because she knows that she will be kidnapped, too. Agatha realizes that they look like good and evil in their contrasting outfits of pink and black. They go to the lake, where Sophie packs cucumbers for her beauty routine, and Agatha flicks matches into the water.
Agatha doesn’t understand why Sophie wants to be taken, because it would mean leaving her family forever. Sophie admits that her friendship with Agatha began as one of Sophie’s good deeds, but she now counts Agatha as her only friend. Sophie makes Agatha feel ordinary, but Sophie doesn’t want to be ordinary; she wants to be a princess. The clock in the village rings to signal a new hour, and the girls wish—separately—that they will still be together tomorrow.
Chapter 2 Summary: “The Art of Kidnapping”
The first kidnappings in Gavaldon happened 200 years before Agatha and Sophie. The Gavaldonians blamed bears until the missing children showed up as characters in their fairy tales. Once a year, the town bookseller found a box of four brand-new tales waiting inside his shop like magic. On the corner of the books were the letters S.G.E within the crest of a white swan and a black swan— The School for Good and Evil. They named the kidnapper the School Master.
After the sun sets, Sophie removes the barricade from her window to make herself easier to kidnap while the villagers guard the forest. She puts gingerbread hearts on her window for the School Master and goes to sleep. Agatha steals the cookies, leaving a trail of crumbs on her way home. Agatha finds her mom packing a trunk for her to take to school because she wants Agatha to make something of herself. Sophie wakes to find the cookies gone, grabs her bags and glass slippers, and hops out the window to meet the School Master. Agatha wakes from a nightmare to shiny blue eyes looking at her. The eyes belong to a shadow that floats toward Sophie’s house. Agatha leaves to save Sophie.
Agatha throws a furious Sophie back through her window, and Sophie’s father joins them. The shadow follows, knocks him out, and takes Sophie. Agatha tries to wrestle Sophie away from the shadow while it drags them through the forest. The shadow drops them in an elm tree where a huge bird emerges from a giant egg and grabs them in his claws. It flies them out of the forest to the School for Good and Evil. The bird drops Agatha over the tower of Good. Sophie screams that she is the Good one, but the bird drops her over the Tower of Evil.
Chapter 3 Summary: “The Great Mistake”
Sophie wakes up in a black moat and hurries away from a weaselly looking boy who asks to touch her hair. On the shore, wolves herd students into the school. Sophie protests that she is in the wrong school, and a wolf kicks her into line. She walks inside, and all the ugly students stare at her, the only beautiful one in their midst. Sophie tries to find someone to correct the mistake and sees a dwarf on a stepladder hanging pictures of the new class. Sophie grabs her portrait from him, insisting she’s good. The stepladder falls and deposits Sophie at the front of the line, where a hag hands Sophie her school supplies and black school uniform. Sophie runs away.
Agatha wakes in a field of flowers where beautiful girls—who don’t look like her—sprout from the ground around her. A boy fairy bites Agatha, so she swallows him. Agatha coughs him up as the others gape at her. The fairies fly the girls into the School for Good, where the girls surround Agatha. Beatrix, the ringleader, asks to see Agatha’s Flowerground pass for proof Agatha belongs there. Agatha farts loudly and sprints through the doors. Before she can leave, a wave from the lake slams her back inside. Agatha wants to rescue Sophie and tells a nymph that there’s been a mistake, but the nymph hands Agatha her school supplies and pink uniform. Agatha runs away.
Fairies chase Agatha into the lake, which is a portal to the bridge between the two schools. Agatha and Sophie see each other and run to each other, but they slam into an invisible barrier. Fairies snare Agatha, and wolves grab Sophie. Sophie yells that they are making a mistake. A wolf says there are no mistakes.
Chapter 4 Summary: “The Three Witches of Room 66”
The wolves parade Sophie through the halls to Room 66 tied to a spit like a roasted pig. Inside, Sophie meets her roommates Hester, Anadil, and Dot, who do not believe she belongs with the villains due to her beauty. Sophie hears fairies in the hallway but realizes they aren’t there to rescue her when they alert the wolves to her presence. Her roommates explain the difference between Evers and Nevers. Evers are heroes who find happily ever after, and Nevers are villains. Sophie is a Reader, an ordinary village person who reads stories, while her roommates are from fairy-tale families. Hester taunts Sophie to prove she’s Good by holding her out the window. Sophie claims her beauty is proof of Goodness, and Hester releases her. Wolves come to take the students to the Welcoming at the School for Good and force Sophie into her uniform.
After Agatha’s roommates move in with other girls to avoid her, Agatha climbs onto her window ledge to escape. In the midpoint between the two schools is a tower guarded by fairies and wolves with the shadow who kidnapped her in the tower window. She decides to rescue Sophie and get to the tower. She finds a loose ceiling tile in her ceiling that turns into a secret tunnel to the Gallery of Good, the museum devoted to fairy-tale heroes. Agatha finds a painting of the people of Gavaldon throwing their fairy tales into the fire. She hides when the two heads of the schools, Lady Lesso and Professor Dovey, argue about the School Master’s fixing the tales so Good always wins. Agatha escapes and blends in with the other girls for the Welcoming.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Boys Ruin Everything”
Sophie tries to get the attention of the princesses in the School for Good when Agatha tackles her and explains they can go to the School Master’s tower and go home. Sophie insists they switch clothes to be in the right schools. They argue until the handsome Everboys sword fight through the door and then give flowers to the Evergirls. The most handsome boy enters last and easily disarms the other boys. Sophie tries to get his rose, but a wolf forces her back to the Evil side. Agatha gets his rose instead. Hester tells Sophie the boy is Tedros, King Arthur’s son. Sophie decides that he is her destiny and daydreams about him while Agatha tries to talk to her.
The students are welcomed by a two-headed dog; his good head is named Pollux, and the bad one is named Castor. They explain the difference between the schools and the rules. When the students point out that Agatha and Sophie are in the wrong schools, Pollux tells them to trust the School Master’s judgment to protect the balance of Good and Evil. The best student from each school is selected as class captain at the end of the year and gets special privileges. Agatha asks Pollux to let her see the School Master, but Castor and Pollux say she can’t. Agatha passes Sophie a note arranging a meeting and realizes that Sophie’s wanting a prince is their obstacle to going home.
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
The first five chapters of The School for Good and Evil introduce readers to the story’s world as well as set up the primary conflict for the rest of the novel. The two protagonists are introduced in the first chapter as opposites but friends. Sophie appears to be the perfect princess because she is beautiful and tries to do good deeds, while Agatha appears to be the perfect witch because she lives in a graveyard, loves black, and is different. As Sophie points out, “In fairy tales, different usually turns out, um . . . evil” (16). They are close friends despite their differences, and they want to be together. When they are taken by the School Master, Agatha is dropped in the School for Good, while Sophie is taken to the School for Evil. Immediately, their opposing purposes are made clear. All Agatha wants is to be ordinary. She thinks she can achieve her desire by going home because home is familiar, and she and Sophie can be friends there without the complications associated with being a witch and princess. Sophie, however, doesn’t want to go home: She wants to be extraordinary. Her purpose is to get switched into the School for Good, where she thinks she belongs. Their conflict is made clear at the very end of the fifth chapter: “Agatha wanted her only friend back. But a friend wasn’t enough for Sophie. Sophie had always wanted more. Sophie wanted a prince.” (91). Agatha’s point of view shows the opposing motivations that will drive the girls’ character arcs and the plot for the rest of the novel. Agatha wants Sophie, so she will do anything for her. Sophie’s goal, however, is Tedros, and she will do anything—including betraying Agatha multiple times—to get what she wants. Their opposing desires are set on a course for conflict in the first section.
Fairy-tale tropes that will be important throughout the rest of the narrative are introduced in this section. The opposing forces of Good and Evil are the primary example of this literary device. The way the school is set up puts these two concepts in opposition to each other and forces the students to become either one or the other. Pollux explains the school keeps the balance of Good and Evil stable, so a fairy-tale character must be all Good or all Evil. There is no room for a mixture of either. This totalizing view of the nature of good and evil is set to become a theme in the novel to demonstrate that boxing people into only one category and not allowing them to develop is problematic and doesn’t allow for humanity, growth, or change.
Agatha and Sophie seem to be set up to be Good and Evil on opposing sides from the beginning, with Sophie appearing to be the traditional Good princess and Agatha being the witch: “Two girls, one beautiful, one ugly, sat side by side on the shore of a lake. Sophie packed cucumbers in a silk pouch, while Agatha flicked lit matches into the water” (13). Chainani intentionally uses fairy-tale tropes in this scene to make it appear that Sophie is a stereotypical fairy-tale princess; she cares about her beauty routine, good deeds, and the color pink. Agatha appears to be a fairy-tale witch because she mindlessly throws matches in the water, is a loner, and wears black. However, Chainani subverts these tropes; for example, Sophie is obsessed with doing Good deeds only to be noticed by the School Master, not due to concern for others. Her rudeness to Radley when no one is looking also casts her supposed goodness in doubt. Agatha, despite embodying the stereotypically evil role, shows her good nature by putting others before herself, as when she puts herself in danger trying to rescue Sophie from the shadow kidnapper. When the girls are taken to the School for Good and Evil and placed in their schools, the selection doesn’t make sense to them. Due to third-person omniscient narration, this placement makes perfect sense to readers, who have access to the girls’ thoughts. Chainani plays with the fairy tale tropes of witch and princess to subvert reader expectations. Since fairy tales make one person the hero and another the villain, the narrative seems to be setting up this central conflict to end with one the victor and the other the vanquished. However, the girls’ strong friendship will disrupt this binary fairy-tale narrative of heroes and villains.
The omniscient narrator is another fairy-tale aspect of this novel. Narrators in fairy tales are often omniscient, which means they know everything about the characters’ thoughts and motivations, can jump forward and backward in time to fill in pieces of the narrative, and control when to reveal and conceal certain details. Chainani uses this narrative viewpoint to show readers the full picture of the novel’s world. Although the narrative spends most of its time with the two protagonists, it jumps into other characters’ heads or into a different time period to provide readers a more complete context. For example, in Chapter Two, the narrator jumps back in time to show the history of the kidnappings in Gavaldon and provide backstory. The omniscient narrator allows the reader to see the full picture of the narrative and observe things the characters themselves cannot see.
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