This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides.

Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. Gradually-too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic-it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales.

All I had to do was listen for the words.Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.Įvery four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Every morning I sat down at my desk and had the strongest feeling that the story already existed. I wrote the first draft in a month, and it was the best writing experience I’ve ever had and by far the most fun. After that, I found couldn’t stop doing it. My non-fiction project was going badly to say the least, so I set it aside for a few days to work on the giraffe story. It just came to me like I was watching a movie. The first Saturday came and I wrote the first chapter. But the giraffe story was still in my head so I made up my mind that every Saturday I’d sit down and have a tinker with it. I returned to London a month later and started working on a non-fiction project. Well, the whole time I was away I found I couldn’t stop thinking about the girl and her giraffe. By coincidence, I was about to leave cold, rainy England for a safari in my homeland, Zimbabwe, and a visit to South Africa’s Western Cape. I decided that one day when I was retired I’d turn it into a picture book. I went home and wrote down the outline of the story. I grew up in Africa where I actually had a pet giraffe, so my first thought was: Wouldn’t it be the coolest thing on earth if you could actually ride a giraffe? And right there, on the street, the whole story came into my mind, including the girl’s name: Martine. In 2004, I was walking down a bleak, wintry London street shortly before Christmas when, out of nowhere, an image of a girl on a giraffe popped into my head.

The white giraffe martine