This year, best friends Sophie and Agatha are about to discover where all the lost children go: the fabled School for Good & Evil, where ordinary boys and girls are trained to be fairy tale heroes and villains. An opposing pair, plucked from youth and spirited away.” The other was homely and odd, an outcast from birth. One was always beautiful and good, the child every parent wanted as their own. But if at first the choices seemed random, soon the pattern became clear. Some years it was two boys taken, some years two girls, sometimes one of each. “The first kidnappings happened two hundred years before. Over 8,000 people have taken it so far… and it’s pretty balanced between Evers, or those that skew Good, and Nevers, or those who skew Evil. To play with this idea, I created the entrance exam to The School for Good and Evil on the book’s website, which tests what percentage of your soul is Good and what percentage of your soul is Evil. Which seems quite accurate to me, by the way. And so the book begins with the quite provocative idea that every child’s soul fundamentally skews towards Good or Evil, that each child is born inclined to create… or to destroy.
So just by starting with fundamental questions, I realized I could actually conceive a school around these principles. Balance might even be called optimistic.) And I wanted to deal with the notion that Good has been winning everything… and what did that mean? Why does Good always win these days in stories? And is that what children really need to learn?
So with THE SCHOOL FOR GOOD AND EVIL, I wanted to start in that kind of world with true consequences – and where there is balance between Good or Evil (which is in fact the reality of our world today.
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