Author: Soman Chainani
Publisher: Harper
Rating: WORTHY!
So after all the ebook authors who have dot com websites, now I have a hardback author who has a dot net! I loved that! So I've never heard of this guy before, and I found this book purely by accident at the library, on the "New" shelf. This, of course, merely means that the novel could have been published any time in the last four freaking years (they also have Sapphire Blue on that shelf! It doesn't mean that the novel is new: just that it's new to this library!
This is one of the most charmingly-written books I've read in a long time, and it starts out perfectly. The novel is about the fortunes and misfortunes of Agatha and Sophie, two extremely disparate friends who live in the extraordinarily isolated village of Gavaldon, surrounded by an impenetrable forest - well, it’s penetrable, but everyone who has gone in there trying to find a way through it has inevitably ended-up right back at Gavaldon - assuming they made it back at all.
Life in Gavaldon would seem idyllic, but there is a shadow over it. Every four years the 'schoolmaster' arrives in the night, and takes two children who miraculously later reappear, but not as children in the village: as characters in a fairytale which anonymously arrives on the door-step of the local bookseller at random times. Now you see what I meant about it being idyllic: it has a book shop and no distractions from reading the books!
Talking of shadows, Sophie has her own: she's unhappy because she just knows she's a good and real princess who deserves much more than she can expect in this little village. Indeed, her friendship with Agatha arose only because she wanted to do a good deed, any good deed, and chose Agatha as her victim. But it became much more than that. Agatha, because of her rough appearance, is shunned by pretty-much everyone except Sophie. The entire village thinks she's a witch. Sophie's dad barricades his daughter into her room on the night the schoolmaster is expected, but she pries her way out because she wants to be taken into the fairy tale world to become a princess. Agatha doesn’t believe in this schoolmaster crap until she sees a gnarled shadow that night, heading for Sophie's house. This shadow belongs to one of the most reticent, but important characters in the whole novel.
She races after it to rescue her friend, but both are caught up and bustled off to The School for Good and Evil. Unfortunately, from both their perspectives, there seems to be a mix-up: Sophie finds herself deposited into the evil side of the school, and Agatha into the good side. They both protest vehemently, but to no avail. When they finally kick and fuss, and run and side-step, and manage to meet on the bridge over the lake (good side) / moat (bad side) which divides the two branches of the school, there's an impassable barrier which prevents Agatha from saving Sophie, or Sophie from escaping to the side she knows must be right for her. Even when by subterfuge they manage to switch sides, they suddenly find themselves magically back on their original side again. It seems there is no escape. But there is.
Everyone can plainly see that both of them are (it would seem) quite evidently out of place, but no one seems either willing or able to do anything about it, and as if that wasn't bad enough, when Sophie and Agatha finally do meet, at the welcome assembly, and the princes come prancing in, it’s Agatha, and not Sophie, who (accidentally, to boot) catches the rose which Prince Tedros (son of King Arthur) tosses! This is, of course, before she decks him and gives him a black eye when they later meet, and she sets fire to an entire school tower! Tedros is a complete loser who deserves everything he gets, and is very much the paragon of Disney animation.
There is an apparently all-important question which the schoolmaster asks the two girls to resolve in order to be free: "What's the one thing evil can never have…and the one thing good can never do without?", and the answer is rather trite and disappointing, but it's resolved in a very unexpected manner. The manner in which it's answered is perfect, and I confess I was seriously hoping it would go this way, but in all honesty doubted that Chainani would have the guts and vision to go there. He did, and I love him for it!. Actually, you'd know the answer if only you’d been foresighted enough to buy my book Poem y Granite and read the poem on page 140! Hah!
So the last thing you need to expect from this novel is the expected, and I can say that with a certainty because I've finished reading this now, and my opinion is unchanged from what it began as: this novel is simply one of the best I've ever read. I've looked at some adverse criticism of the novel to see if I missed something other critics might have spotted, and I really didn't. It's anyone's choice, of course, whether they like a novel or not, but I have to say that a lot of those who are low-rating this novel do show seriously skewed views of what it was, what it was about, and what it tried to do. One silly criticism was that the characters were shallow and black and white. I disagree with that, because the two main protagonists were about as nuanced, complex, and conflicted and you can get, but even if that were not so, this is a novel about fairy-tale characters! For goodness sakes, since when have they had any depth?
How foolish is it to whine about how the characters are playing to type when it's a fairy-tale, and the characters are in a school which has the express purpose of training them to play to the very types which the critics complain about? Honestly? Some of the critics evidently haven't even read the novel because they're banging on about how the evil witch makes all the princes disappear (which would have been a very cool ending) but that's simply not what happened. Worse than this, some are also hypocrites, complaining that the characters are shallow and then describing the two main characters as the "beautiful" princess and the "ugly" witch! Seriously?
The whiny critics are simply wrong, so there! This novel is awesome and I fully and unreservedly recommend it.
