The School for Good and Evil

About The School for Good and Evil

Every few years, two children vanish from the village of Gavaldon, spirited away to the School for Good and Evil, where one is trained to be a storybook hero and the other a storybook villain. Sophie is convinced she's destined for Good — all blonde hair and princess dreams — while her strange, cynical best friend Agatha assumes she's obviously Evil. When they're each dropped into the opposite school, both girls (and the fairy-tale universe's entire moral architecture) are forced to confront how little "good" and "evil" have to do with looks, manners, or wanting the right things. Soman Chainani builds a sharp, funny, occasionally quite dark satire of fairy-tale tropes and the beauty standards packed into them, then spends six more books complicating its own black-and-white premise as the two friends' loyalty is tested across shifting alliances, a prophecy-driven trip to Camelot, and eventually a prequel duology explaining how the School itself came to exist.

This is a strong pick for readers who want their fairy tales interrogated rather than retold straight — there's real bite to its examination of gender roles, friendship versus romance, and the cost of forcing people into hero/villain boxes, wrapped in propulsive, high-concept plotting and a lot of genre-savvy humor. The three sub-arcs (School Years, Camelot Years, and the Rise/Fall prequel duology) each raise the emotional and body-count stakes further, making this a good next step for readers graduating from gentler fairy-tale retellings toward something with real teeth.

How to read this series

Read the original trilogy first, in order: The School for Good and Evil, A World Without Princes, The Last Ever After. This is a complete, self-contained story about Sophie and Agatha and can be read on its own.

The story then continues directly into the Camelot Years trilogy — Quests for Glory, A Crystal of Time, One True King — which follows the same world's next generation of students and assumes you've read the first trilogy. The Ever Never Handbook (2016) is an in-universe reference companion, not a novel, and is optional. The two-book prequel, Rise of the School for Good and Evil and Fall of the School for Good and Evil, was published after the main six novels but tells the origin story of the School itself; it's written to be readable on its own, but most fans read it last, as a capstone that recontextualizes everything that came before rather than a true starting point.