100 pages 3 hours read

Soman Chainani

The School For Good and Evil

Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade

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Character Analysis

Sophie

Sophie is one of the two protagonists of The School for Good and Evil. She is stunningly beautiful, even after being jolted awake: “Her waist-long hair, the color of spun gold, didn’t have its usual sheen. Her jade-green eyes looked faded, her luscious red lips a touch dry. Even the glow of her creamy peach skin had dulled” (3). Sophie thinks her beauty makes her Good, and she is destined to be a princess because she is too beautiful for this world. She goes around her village of Gavaldon doing good deeds so the School Master will notice and take her to be a princess. Although Sophie thinks she is good, the deeds she does makes it clear that her good acts are not motivated by kindness or generosity, and she is almost comically self-absorbed: “She had donated homemade lemonwood face wash to the town orphanage (for, as she insisted to the befuddled benefactor, ‘Proper skin care is the greatest deed of all.’)” (6). Sophie does good deeds to be recognized for them and perceived as better than other people. She is ambitious and wants to be known as extraordinary. She tells Agatha, “I can’t live an ordinary life” (16).