In the series’ first installment, readers are introduced to the village of Gavaldon and the nearby School for Good and Evil, run by an enigmatic and seemingly immoral Evil School Master. Every four years, the School Master kidnaps two unenchanted children from Gavaldon: one to attend the School for Good and one to attend the School for Evil. Ironically, he deposits the beautiful, blonde, pink-loving Sophie at the School for Evil and Agatha, her black-haired, cemetery-dwelling best friend, at the School for Good. Despite the girls’ many attempts to escape, they are forced to stay, and the School Master grows to believe that Sophie is his one true love. Agatha’s mother once sang a song about the school that included the lines, “Try to escape and you’ll always fail / The only way out is / Through a fairy tale…,” foreshadowing the girls’ predicament (The School for Good and Evil). The girls confront the School Master, but he will not allow them to go home until the Storian, a magical pen, finishes their fairy tale. He gives them a riddle.

The girls realize that the riddle’s answer is “true love,” and they set about trying to make Tedros, the prince of Camelot, fall in love with Sophie. This will prove Sophie is Good and allow Agatha to return home. Agatha helps Sophie time and again, but Sophie is consistently disloyal to her and even betrays Tedros, who falls in love with Agatha. Eventually, Sophie attacks Tedros, and Agatha stops her, provoking Sophie to try to kill Agatha. Tedros leads an Ever attack on the School for Evil, prompting Sophie’s retaliation. The School Master tells Sophie that he killed his brother, who was Good, upsetting the balance between Good and Evil so that Good always wins. His desire to restore that balance through love leads him to believe Sophie is the answer to his quest. Sophie rejects his offer of love, sensing a future full of Evil, and when he tries to murder Agatha, Sophie sacrifices herself for her friend. The Good brother’s spirit returns to destroy the School Master; Sophie dies in Agatha’s arms, but Agatha brings her back to life with a kiss. Though Tedros reaches for Agatha, who he believes to be his true love, Agatha chooses friendship over romance—her kiss returns Agatha and Sophie safely to Gavaldon.

In The School for Good and Evil, one employee informs students that they “are chosen to protect the balance between Good and Evil. For once that balance is compromised […] Our world will perish” (“Important Quotes.” SuperSummary). This idea that good and evil, or heroism and villainy, exist in a kind of balance is further explored in A World Without Princes, often through Sophie’s continued claims to goodness, despite her sometimes-wicked choices. Good and evil are revealed to be a matter of perspective, and they are not fixed or immutable categories, similar to notions of gender. The sequel extends this theme, exploring not just how morality is subjective but how societal expectations around identity—both in terms of goodness and gender—can be equally fluid. The revelation that “true love” between females can and does exist undermines society’s rigid notions of what boys and girls should be or who each should desire, and the war of the sexes here mirrors the war between the Schools of Good and Evil in the first. In addition, just as the fixedness of notions like good and evil, and masculine and feminine, are called into question, so is the idea of the absolute and traditional fairy-tale happy ending. At the end of The School for Good and Evil, Agatha and Sophie believe they have achieved their happy ending, but the entire plot of A World Without Princes challenges the fairy-tale idea that resolution of one challenge leads to a neat ending, or an ending at all.

Language specific to the world of The School for Good and Evil and A World Without Princes includes mogrifying—the magical ability to shapeshift into an animal form, a skill Agatha uses during the Trial to transform into a cat. Spiricks are snake-like creatures covered in sharp needles that serve as the guards of the School for Boys, attacking intruders by wrapping around them and piercing their skin. The Storian, a sentient magical pen, dictates the fates of fairy tale characters, granting immense narrative power to whoever controls it. The School Master’s Tower, which follows the Storian wherever it goes, symbolizes the consolidation of male authority in the magical world. Meanwhile, The Trial is a high-stakes, combative event where students compete to prove their worth; in this book, it becomes the battleground for the escalating conflict between boys and girls, determining the school’s shifting balance of power.