We all have two sides. Even the best of us. I confess that I do the good thing on occasion. So why is Good so afraid to admit they can be evil?

This was a really interesting book. I feel like I can think about this for ages.

I really liked the main series for playing with assumptions about good and evil and what they mean.
This one goes just a bit further in expanding that. True love in the main series was very focused on romance even though the characters were 13. Here, true love also applies to friends, family and community. (Side note, romantic true love is not defined as between boys and girls either)
One of the characters sees a future for himself with a guy he is not in love with because if they are close friends their love is still true. It especially applies to the two school masters. Evil can never have true love, yet the evil schoolmaster clearly loves his brother. If the Good school masters does questionable things for a good cause, is he still Good?

In the main books, I didn’t like how blond hair was likened to goodness while darker features were connected to evil. This book makes a point to emphasize that good and evil are not inherent, like I thought in the main series, but decided by a persons actions.

The main downside was that the story of the school masters is told through various other characters, like Aladdin, Marialena and Vulcan. It made the pacing feel kinda off. Sometimes the book felt like multiple stories connected into one book rather than one story about two brothers.
The result is a mosaic of characters and stories dancing around the morality of ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’. Neither of the brothers is truly good or evil, and the characters aren’t either.

(I really want to know what made the evil school master go from a bitter and sometimes spiteful young man who loves his brother to the creepy figure lurking in shadows and kissing twelve year old girls from book 1)

(I also wonder what age these two are supposed to be? They're immortals stuck into teenage bodies, both extremely powerful and old and simultaneously having crushes on their teenage/twenty-something colleagues?) ( )