 "Tween good and evil")
Miami-born Sindhi Soman Chainani makes a splashy debut with The School for Good and Evil. He tells Indira Kannan that it is a fairy tale that aims to address the anxieties of today's youth.
Once upon a time, an Indian American writer and filmmaker had an idea for a book. It would be a fairy tale, and a trilogy. A major publisher bought the story and the first book bounced on to the bestseller list. A Hollywood studio bought the rights to the book in a seven-figure deal. That, so far, is the story behind The School for Good and Evil, the splashy debut effort of New York-based author Soman Chainani.
SGE (HarperCollins Children's Books, $16.99) is meant primarily for tweens, but packs enough complexity and appeal for a wider audience to have entered at number 7 on the The New York Times bestseller list in the first week of its US release in May.
Books in this genre are now divided into two distinct eras - before Harry Potter, and after. In an interview from New York, Chainani admits "this book never would have existed" in the era preceding J K Rowling's series. "I think her series just brought new readers, she made it a cool thing to read during the summer apart from school."
Chainani didn't set out to write a fairy tale or even a children's book, for that matter. The 33-year-old Harvard and Columbia graduate kicked around the story in his head for about five years. "First I thought it might be adult fiction, Wicked or something like that," he said. "But as I started writing it I started to see that okay, this seems like a natural story for children because it stars children."
As the title suggests, the book is set in a school, a sort of Enid Blyton's Malory Towers meets J K Rowling's Hogwarts. The main characters are Sophie and Agatha, two children from the village of Gavaldon. Sophie is instantly recognisable to anyone familiar with the heroines of today's tween pop culture - long, golden hair, jade green eyes, peaches-and-cream skin, red lips. The girl she is determined to befriend as her "good deed" is Agatha, the one with short, black hair, pale skin, jutting bones and ladybug eyes. The fairy tale has found its princess and its witch.
But Sophie, convinced of her destiny as a princess, longs to be taken away to the School for Good. To this end, she has been doing good deeds, which to her means donating homemade lemonwood face wash to the orphanage ("Proper skin care is the greatest deed of all"), and putting up a mirror in the church toilet so worshippers could return to the pews looking their best. Agatha doesn't believe in the lore and wants to be left alone.
But SGE is not a traditional fairy tale, so Sophie and Agatha don't play true to type. Sophie is indeed kidnapped, along with her friend, but is shocked to find herself hurled into the fetid moat of the School for Evil, while Agatha, kicking and screaming, is transported into the cotton candy world of the School for Good. So who's the princess?
Chainani says he set out to follow the fairy-tale formula with the aim of subverting it to bring up some unpleasant facts. The whole idea behind this fairytale was to "address the anxieties of today's youth". And what might those be? Survival, for one. But not of the Hansel-and-Gretel kind. "Today I think it's much more about surviving middle school and the bullies and the emphasis on the looks and the fact that girls are so pressured by the media to look and act in certain ways," says Chainani.
The author wanted to upend the image of the "Disney princess". "I think it's just the deconstruction of the Disney princess, which has become a billion dollar industry, this idea of the pink princess that girls under 12 are supposed to aspire to and want to be. So I think turning her into the villain, which is sort of the whole principle of the book, is something we've never seen before," Chainani explains.
He drives the point home with descriptions of the princess wannabes at the School for Good, where Agatha finds herself such a misfit. On the first day of class, 50 girls "flurried into each other's rooms, glossing lips, poofing hair, buffing nails, and trailing so much perfume that fairies passed out and littered the hall like dead flies". No one has time for breakfast. "Breakfast makes you fat anyway," one of them declares.
Next door, at the School for Evil, Sophie, who learns to her horror that she will have to take a class in Uglification, alongside students sporting overbites, bulging bellies, sickly skin and body hair, is still worried about finding a way to juice cucumbers and puree pumpkins and melons for face masks.
The bulk of the book is devoted to school capers that Harry Potter or comic book fans will have come to expect, complete with gargoyles, magic spells, cockroaches and hair-raising escapades. To complete the fairy tale there's also tween romance, with the princesses nursing crushes on the boys from Good. Sophie, though on the Evil side, is bewitched by the blond, broad-shouldered Tedros, the dashing prince among the Good boys. The author's familiarity with Indian epics is evident from a character in the School for Evil, a boy named Ravan.
Chainani uses classical language throughout the book for his narration and for his characters. "I try never to use a word invented after the time when the Grimms fairy tales originated, so the book feels like a real fairy tale," he says. There are also passages guaranteed to entertain a middle school audience: "She did the first thing she thought of and delivered a swift, loud fart."
Throughout the book, Sophie schemes to get into the School for Good, even if that means condemning her friend Agatha to the horrors of the School for Evil. Agatha, innocent to Sophie's real intentions, tries to engineer an escape back to Gavaldon for both of them. When Sophie finds Agatha has more opportunities to spend time with her dream prince Tedros, it fuels her jealousy. Chainani has a message in this as well: "One of the things for girls in the book is to really kind of show girls and boys that relationships between two girlfriends at that age is still strong and so often they lose it over a boy."
When the girls realise they are about to be written into a new fairy tale, committed forever to a world of paper, they fight the schoolmaster and the magic pen Storian to escape their fate. The story does have a fairy-tale ending, but with one of the subversive twists that Chainani aimed for.
The Miami-born author studied English and American Literature at Harvard and filmmaking at Columbia University. He worked briefly as Mira Nair's assistant, and was a co-founder of the South Asian International Film Festival in New York, the city where he has lived for the past decade. His film credits include writing and directing award-winning short films.
Chainani has strong connections to India. His family is originally from pre-Partition Sindh and he still has relatives in Mumbai. He says he is a big Aamir Khan fan, having seen Dil Chahta Hai "six or seven times". In fact, he was in talks to direct a film for Yashraj Films and lived for a few months in Mumbai before getting the book deal and moving back to New York to work on SGE.
He is already half way through the sequel to SGE, which is due out next spring or summer, and the third book is slotted for a year after that. He anticipates the film based on the first book will begin shooting next year and open in 2015. He will also write the screenplay for the film. It's to be produced by Jane Startz, the producer of Ella Enchanted, and Joe Roth and Palak Patel of Universal, the team that delivered the hit Snow White and the Huntsman.
HarperCollins confirmed that SGE would be available in India, but is yet to finalise a release date or the price.
Fans of the book will agree that however subversive its plot and climax may be, the real fairy tale ending of this genre is getting tweens to give up their Xboxes to read a book.
THE SCHOOL FOR GOOD AND EVIL
Author: Soman Chainani
Publisher: Harper Collins Children's Books
Pages: 496
Price: $16.99
Once upon a time, an Indian American writer and filmmaker had an idea for a book. It would be a fairy tale, and a trilogy. A major publisher bought the story and the first book bounced on to the bestseller list. A Hollywood studio bought the rights to the book in a seven-figure deal. That, so far, is the story behind The School for Good and Evil, the splashy debut effort of New York-based author Soman Chainani.
SGE (HarperCollins Children's Books, $16.99) is meant primarily for tweens, but packs enough complexity and appeal for a wider audience to have entered at number 7 on the The New York Times bestseller list in the first week of its US release in May.
Books in this genre are now divided into two distinct eras - before Harry Potter, and after. In an interview from New York, Chainani admits "this book never would have existed" in the era preceding J K Rowling's series. "I think her series just brought new readers, she made it a cool thing to read during the summer apart from school."
Chainani didn't set out to write a fairy tale or even a children's book, for that matter. The 33-year-old Harvard and Columbia graduate kicked around the story in his head for about five years. "First I thought it might be adult fiction, Wicked or something like that," he said. "But as I started writing it I started to see that okay, this seems like a natural story for children because it stars children."
As the title suggests, the book is set in a school, a sort of Enid Blyton's Malory Towers meets J K Rowling's Hogwarts. The main characters are Sophie and Agatha, two children from the village of Gavaldon. Sophie is instantly recognisable to anyone familiar with the heroines of today's tween pop culture - long, golden hair, jade green eyes, peaches-and-cream skin, red lips. The girl she is determined to befriend as her "good deed" is Agatha, the one with short, black hair, pale skin, jutting bones and ladybug eyes. The fairy tale has found its princess and its witch.
But Sophie, convinced of her destiny as a princess, longs to be taken away to the School for Good. To this end, she has been doing good deeds, which to her means donating homemade lemonwood face wash to the orphanage ("Proper skin care is the greatest deed of all"), and putting up a mirror in the church toilet so worshippers could return to the pews looking their best. Agatha doesn't believe in the lore and wants to be left alone.
But SGE is not a traditional fairy tale, so Sophie and Agatha don't play true to type. Sophie is indeed kidnapped, along with her friend, but is shocked to find herself hurled into the fetid moat of the School for Evil, while Agatha, kicking and screaming, is transported into the cotton candy world of the School for Good. So who's the princess?
Chainani says he set out to follow the fairy-tale formula with the aim of subverting it to bring up some unpleasant facts. The whole idea behind this fairytale was to "address the anxieties of today's youth". And what might those be? Survival, for one. But not of the Hansel-and-Gretel kind. "Today I think it's much more about surviving middle school and the bullies and the emphasis on the looks and the fact that girls are so pressured by the media to look and act in certain ways," says Chainani.
The author wanted to upend the image of the "Disney princess". "I think it's just the deconstruction of the Disney princess, which has become a billion dollar industry, this idea of the pink princess that girls under 12 are supposed to aspire to and want to be. So I think turning her into the villain, which is sort of the whole principle of the book, is something we've never seen before," Chainani explains.
He drives the point home with descriptions of the princess wannabes at the School for Good, where Agatha finds herself such a misfit. On the first day of class, 50 girls "flurried into each other's rooms, glossing lips, poofing hair, buffing nails, and trailing so much perfume that fairies passed out and littered the hall like dead flies". No one has time for breakfast. "Breakfast makes you fat anyway," one of them declares.
Next door, at the School for Evil, Sophie, who learns to her horror that she will have to take a class in Uglification, alongside students sporting overbites, bulging bellies, sickly skin and body hair, is still worried about finding a way to juice cucumbers and puree pumpkins and melons for face masks.
The bulk of the book is devoted to school capers that Harry Potter or comic book fans will have come to expect, complete with gargoyles, magic spells, cockroaches and hair-raising escapades. To complete the fairy tale there's also tween romance, with the princesses nursing crushes on the boys from Good. Sophie, though on the Evil side, is bewitched by the blond, broad-shouldered Tedros, the dashing prince among the Good boys. The author's familiarity with Indian epics is evident from a character in the School for Evil, a boy named Ravan.
Chainani uses classical language throughout the book for his narration and for his characters. "I try never to use a word invented after the time when the Grimms fairy tales originated, so the book feels like a real fairy tale," he says. There are also passages guaranteed to entertain a middle school audience: "She did the first thing she thought of and delivered a swift, loud fart."
Throughout the book, Sophie schemes to get into the School for Good, even if that means condemning her friend Agatha to the horrors of the School for Evil. Agatha, innocent to Sophie's real intentions, tries to engineer an escape back to Gavaldon for both of them. When Sophie finds Agatha has more opportunities to spend time with her dream prince Tedros, it fuels her jealousy. Chainani has a message in this as well: "One of the things for girls in the book is to really kind of show girls and boys that relationships between two girlfriends at that age is still strong and so often they lose it over a boy."
When the girls realise they are about to be written into a new fairy tale, committed forever to a world of paper, they fight the schoolmaster and the magic pen Storian to escape their fate. The story does have a fairy-tale ending, but with one of the subversive twists that Chainani aimed for.
The Miami-born author studied English and American Literature at Harvard and filmmaking at Columbia University. He worked briefly as Mira Nair's assistant, and was a co-founder of the South Asian International Film Festival in New York, the city where he has lived for the past decade. His film credits include writing and directing award-winning short films.
Chainani has strong connections to India. His family is originally from pre-Partition Sindh and he still has relatives in Mumbai. He says he is a big Aamir Khan fan, having seen Dil Chahta Hai "six or seven times". In fact, he was in talks to direct a film for Yashraj Films and lived for a few months in Mumbai before getting the book deal and moving back to New York to work on SGE.
He is already half way through the sequel to SGE, which is due out next spring or summer, and the third book is slotted for a year after that. He anticipates the film based on the first book will begin shooting next year and open in 2015. He will also write the screenplay for the film. It's to be produced by Jane Startz, the producer of Ella Enchanted, and Joe Roth and Palak Patel of Universal, the team that delivered the hit Snow White and the Huntsman.
HarperCollins confirmed that SGE would be available in India, but is yet to finalise a release date or the price.
Fans of the book will agree that however subversive its plot and climax may be, the real fairy tale ending of this genre is getting tweens to give up their Xboxes to read a book.
THE SCHOOL FOR GOOD AND EVIL
Author: Soman Chainani
Publisher: Harper Collins Children's Books
Pages: 496
Price: $16.99