The School for Good and Evil (Soman Chainani)

The School for Good and Evil
The School for Good and Evil series, Book 1
Soman Chainani
Harper
Fiction, MG? Fantasy
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Sophie and Agatha are different as day and night: one blonde and beautiful and always dressed her best, the other pale and brooding and obsessed with death and pain. Like all the other children in town of Woods Beyond, the unlikely friends know the story of the School Master: every year, like clockwork, two children are abducted by a shadowy figure, only to turn up later as illustrations in the fairy tale books that arrive, just as mysteriously, at the local bookstore. Unlike most other kids, though, Sophie wants to be taken away: the girls in those stories always find a prince and their happily-ever-after. Agatha doesn't even believe the stories are more than a cover for runaways.
Then Agatha sees the shadow stealing Sophie away, and gives chase - both of them ending up at the School for Good and Evil in the middle of the endless forest. Only Agatha is dropped into the glass towers of the Good side, where princesses and princes learn the ways of kindness and chivalry to win their happy endings, and Sophie gets delivered to the foul halls of Evil, where loyalty and friendship and even beauty are considered diseases.
Clearly, there's been some kind of mistake. If anyone from Woods Beyond is a princess it's Sophie, and Agatha must surely be a witch; even the faculty and students know it. Besides, Agatha doesn't even want to be in a fairy tale. As the two struggle to survive their new classes and figure out how to escape, they find their bond tested to the utmost as they break the deepest, most basic rule on which the entire school was founded: Good and Evil can never, ever be friends.

REVIEW: Chainani explores the dark, twisted roots of fairy tales and our concepts of good and evil in this story. From the outset, it's clear that there's at least a little evil in Sophie and good in Agatha - it's sometimes irritating how obtuse both could be on this aspect - but it's also clear that something is very wrong with the divisions in the school and the overall balance of power, something only outsiders like the two friends from Woods Beyond can see and possibly balance, if they can ever get the breathing space beyond just surviving. Sophie spends much of her time in sheer denial of where she is, fixating on becoming a Good student and winning her prince (Tedros, son of King Arthur and the top boy on the Good campus.) Agatha is reminded by everyone, especially herself, that she doesn't belong in the Good classes, but her escape plans are constantly thwarted. Meanwhile, their teachers prepare the children for the deadly game of fairy tales that will be their future... though only the top graduates get leading roles, the rest becoming sidekicks (or henchpeople), or even transmogrified into animals or plants, which often have unhappy endings no matter which side they're on. (There's a rather gruesome exhibit in the Good school "honoring" many of these sidekicks in taxidermy form.) These are not Disney fairy tales, or even the watered down versions from Victorian times; these are fairy tales at their darkest, nightmarish and surreal even when the good people win, and the line between a happy and a sad ending is often razor thin. There's a deep-rooted unpleasantness at work here that sometimes repelled me, even if it is true to the original tales, and a few elements of the climax feel subtly unsatisfying. However, this is also one of the most imaginative takes on fairy tale revisits I've read in some time, with near-nonstop action and many unpredictable twists and turns on the way to an explosive finale. While I'm not sure if I want to read on yet (I'm still sorting my reaction to a degree, and the To Be Read pile is plenty deep at the moment), all in all I found it a satisfying, if often gruesome, story.
While Amazon seems reluctant to link to it, I actually read the Barnes and Noble Exclusive Collector's edition, with bonus material that includes two original "Evil" fairy tales mentioned in the text: "Children Noodle Soup" and "Rabid Bear Rex." They were, indeed, dark stories, and as noted in the text, true to a world where Good is never guaranteed a win.
As a closing note, I'm a bit on the fence about the age classification. While I tend to see it shelved with middle grade, there are hints and teases toward the teen end of the market, and I expect the students, like Harry Potter and his friends, mature as the series goes on.

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The Last Unicorn (Peter S. Beagle)

The Last Unicorn
Peter S. Beagle
Roc
Fiction, Fantasy
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: Alone in her lilac wood, immune to the passage of time, the unicorn did not know she was the last of her kind until she overheard a pair of hunters. She sets out into the world and discovers a land changed and lessened and utterly devoid of unicorns: most humans no longer even see her as anything but a white mare. Then she hears rumors of a great Red Bull that chased them away, beyond the castle of the cruel King Haggard. With the hapless magician Schmedrick and the girl Molly Grue, the unicorn seeks the truth of those tales... a truth that may doom her.

REVIEW: Like most children in the 1980's, particularly those with unicorn-loving siblings, I saw the Rankin-Bass animated movie based on this book (which Beagle helped write), but I hadn't read the book itself until now. Would I have enjoyed it as a kid? Knowing me, I doubt it; I was an impatient reader (and more of a dragon person, as I remain now; tangentially, Rankin-Bass also gets some credit/blame for that, in the form of The Flight of Dragons, but I digress.) As an adult, though, I can recognize what Beagle was doing. He was crafting a self-aware fable, a fairy tale that knows it's a fairy tale, unconcerned with solid edges and settings and more about impression and emotion and metaphor, a painting where the shapes may be abstract but the colors are bold and evocative and undeniably emotional, and all the more memorable as a result. Beagle distills the essence of the classical unicorn: not the pony with the cutie mark, not the dewy-eyed horned horse on the bedroom poster, but the embodiment of both purity and unspoiled wilderness, simultaneously terrifying and majestic, a step removed from the mortal world... at least, until forced into it by her quest. The journey leaves a lasting mark on her immortal soul, as it leaves an indelible mark on the people she meets and the lands she crosses and the world itself. Much about the story deliberately defies direct description and solid foundation, dreamlike and nighmarish by turns, steeped in symbolism and metaphor made flesh. The characters could be irritating at times, particularly Schmedrick, the story could dither, and there's more than a dash of sexism (again, in keeping with the archetypes Beagle was deliberately emulating and examining), but the often-poetic descriptions carry it, and story ultimately comes together as more than the sum of its parts, a compelling classic that may have aged around the edges, but still endures, and will linger in my memory long after I read it.

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March Site Update

I just posted the March update for the main Brightdreamer Books site, archiving and cross-linking the month's reviews.

Enjoy!

Revenger (Alastair Reynolds)

Revenger
The Revenger series, Book 1
Alastair Reynolds
Orbit
Fiction, YA? Sci-Fi
**+ (Bad/Okay)

DESCRIPTION: It started as a youthful lark - or, at least, it did to Fura Ness. Her older sister, Adrana, wanted to sneak away from yet another boring party... off to Neural Alley and its forbidden shopfronts of fortune tellers and limb brokers and other unsavory aspects from across the Congregation of artificial worlds. As usual, Fura just trailed in her wake, getting a little thrill for defying their overprotective father, but fully expecting to be home for breakfast. Then Adrana reveals that she's fleeing to the sunjammer spaceship Monetta's Mourn as a Bone Caster, plugging into a neural link with the network of alien skulls that are far more reliable (if full of more tricks) than the standard squawk communicators, and she's sure Fura will have the talent for bonecasting too. It's just supposed to be for six months, enough to find a few prize baubles (ancient artificial worlds full of hidden loot from extinct aliens and previous Occupations) and rebuild the Ness family finances after Father's recent fumbles, and it's got to be more interesting than sitting around practicing needlework.
Then the Monetta's Mourn runs afoul of the legendary pirate Bosa Senna, who is even more brutal than her reputation. What was a simple bid for adventure and fortune turns deadly serious in a heartbeat.
Alone, left for dead on a derelict, the quiet, bookish Fura must step up to the challenge of surviving, recovering her abducted sister... and exacting revenge.

REVIEW: I was expecting, based on the cover and descriptions, a swashbuckling space adventure in the vein of several recent borderline-fantasy space operas, where larger than life piracy and quests for impossible wonders are transposed into a far-future star system crawling with tech that's more like magic than science in many respects. At times, Revenger delivers that. Unfortunately, it does so through the eyes of a character who starts (and, to a degree, stays) a strangely empty hole. Fura is initially just a tagalong, not just in body but in spirit. She drifts in bold Adrana's wake, and despite some token resistance to running away and some hints of internal thoughts I never got a sense of her as more than a plot-shaped void, especially early on. It was an odd feeling that made her transformation from dutiful daughter to revenge-driven space hunter largely unbelievable, though the compressed timespan of the story doesn't help; I simply could not buy her going from a sheltered girl not knowing a prow from a stern to full-on cold-blooded pirate stalker spitting (very annoying) space slang every other word in a span of months.
Perhaps because of this inability to connect with Fura, the world - crawling with smeerps such as "squawks" that are essentially radios and "flickerboxes" that are basically screens or monitors and "lungstuff" that's just breathable air, juxtaposed with plot-convenient oddities such as "lightvine" (a source of illumination that also provides part of a subplot that doesn't quite pay off) and the various fantastic loot found in baubles - just never gelled for me. There were just too many internal inconsistencies and anachronisms, and I was always too aware that this was a swashbuckling pirate story pushed out the airlock into the void, with only vague lip service to a lack of gravity and other issues. I also got a strange vibe off some of the peripheral characters, particularly the Ness father and the family doctor who were weirdly (creepily) obsessed with infantalizing the girls. Most of the rest of the characters were just vague smears with names.
The story moves reasonably fast, with plenty of action and overall weirdness, and it is imaginative, but I just never managed to immerse in it like I'd hoped to, and the rating suffers as a result.

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The Raven Boys (Maggie Stiefvater)

The Raven Boys
The Raven Cycle, Book 1
Maggie Stiefvater
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Fantasy/Romance
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: If you kiss your true love, you will kill him.
All her young life, Blue Sargent has been told this by her mother and other relatives, and she knows better than to doubt them. Unlike many modern charlatans, the Sargent women are the real deal, their predictions good as gold, for all that they usually couch their answers in vague terms for the paying customers. Of course, Blue herself doesn't have that gift; her ability, such as it is, merely magnifies the skills of others. She can't even see the ghosts when her mother makes the annual visit to the nearby churchyard on St. Mark's Eve, when the souls who will die within the next year pass through. But this year, Blue sees one of the spirits: a young man with an indistinct face, in the raven-marked school uniform of nearby elite Aglionby Academy. According to her aunt Neeve, there are only two reasons she would see that ghost and no other. Either the young man is her true love, or she kills him. But Blue has spent her life avoiding boys, and even if she didn't she'd know better than to mingle with the entitled snobs of Aglionby. So how could one of them be her true love?
For years, Gansey has been obsessed with the hunt for the legendary Welsh king Glendower... a search that led him to the small Virginia town of Henrietta and the Aglionby Academy, or rather to the nearby ley lines. Along with the anger-consumed Ronan, the quiet boy Noah, and the trailer park boy Adam struggling to turn a partial scholarship at Aglionby into a ticket out of an abusive home, he's scoured the countryside in search of clues to the king's whereabouts. Legend says that whoever finds him and wakes him will be granted a favor and special powers... but Gansey isn't the only one searching. When his path crosses that of a local psychic and her daughter, he may be on the verge of the breakthrough he's been dreaming of - or a danger he can't comprehend.

REVIEW: In the interest of full disclosure, I picked this up mostly because I was interested in Stiefvater's follow-up, Call Down the Hawk, and I hate coming into series (or worlds established by series) out of order if I can at all help it. Having read this, though, I'm wondering if I need to pursue the rest of the original Raven cycle.
Stiefvater's writing paints vivid images of a timeless Virginia countryside steeped in ancient powers and legends with Old World roots, filling her tale with characters that feel more like larger-than-life sketches, figures from a painting or epic poem, than true flesh-and-blood humans. The whole story feels dictated by prophecy and ley line magic and even a sort of mystic time travel and predestination, which robs the cast of some of their agency; they're basically swept up in greater events rather than charting their own course, and even when they think they're acting independently, it seems the forces of the universe are still a step ahead, twitching the strings. It made me feel a little manipulated, to be honest, and at parts the story feels forced as a result. (To further be honest, for all that it's one of the book's main selling points, the love angle and its associated angst struck me as one of the most manipulative aspects of all, but I can see where it would appeal to readers who like "impossible" loves and tense triangles involving broody, and more than occasionally emotionally oblivious, teens. It just went a bit over the top for my tastes.)
That said, there are some great descriptions, and the characters, for all that they're never quite human, are memorably evocative and emotional. I'm just not sure if it's worth my while to follow three more books where the outcome is already dictated. (Though I still am very interested in Call Down the Hawk...)

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