Foul is Fair by Hannah Capin (Review)

The US cover, because I love it more than the UK cover honestly.

I fight. I will always fucking fight. The ocean should know better.

I have been waiting extremely anxiously and extremely loudly for Marissa Meyer’s Supernova to arrive. It turned up yesterday and I told myself I had to finish La Belle Sauvage first. I finished La Belle Sauvage today, so my next read was going to be Supernova, right? Well. I got stuck in a short queue and I opened Foul is Fair by Hannah Capin on my phone because I was stuck book-less, and within ten pages I was hooked so thoroughly that I accidentally sat down when I got home and read the entire damn book.

Rating: 5 stars!

Thanks to Hannah Capin, Netgalley and Penguin Random House for my arc of this book. Foul is Fair is out in the UK on 16th January 2020!

Trigger Warnings:

Sexual assault, spiked drinks, lots and lots of violence, self-harm, murder, manipulative behaviour, coercive control.

Read me for the:

REVENGE
Powerful women
Dark contemporary fiction
MACBETH ENERGY
Unapologetically Bad People
Dismantling rape culture one murder at a time

The plot:

Mads, Summer and Jenny are the mean girls, the popular girls, and they rule their circle. Jade Khanjara is their queen. They take mean further than catty comments and bitchy looks, these girls do what they want and they get what they want. Nothing happens that they don’t want to happen. Except for one night, Jade’s sweet sixteen. The night four boys spike her drink, lock her in a room and assault her. The night she’s reborn. A queen still, but a killer too. They’re rich boys, athletic boys, popular boys, and Jade knows that society won’t punish them. So she will. Jade and her coven take vengeance into their own hands, and there will be no mercy until Jade’s claws are dripping with blood and she is satisfied.

What did I think?

I loved this book. If you like dark, dark books where you have to set your morality aside at the door, then you’ll love Foul is Fair and you’ll love Jade and her coven. These girls are out for revenge, and they’ll do anything to get it. The timescale seems a little far-fetched, it only takes something like two weeks for Jade to infiltrate, manipulate and destroy these boys, but honestly that’s pretty in-keeping with the ridiculous time-scale in Macbeth so I’m fine with it. I love Macbeth and this book is Macbeth rewritten with female power in mind.

Jade is a bad-ass. She’s ten steps ahead of the boys who’s lives she’s going to systematically ruin, and she doesn’t care what it takes. This book is fucked up, and the characters are even more fucked up than the book itself. She seduces the innocent golden boy, Mack, and she’s going to convince him to kill. I loved her. She’s twisted her trauma into a weapon and maybe her coping methods are unhealthy as hell, but she doesn’t give a fuck.

All of the characters in this book are inhuman, witches and monsters and killers, and maybe that’s why it’s so easy to suspend your morals and enjoy this tale of revenge. I wanted Jade to get her revenge, and if she’d roped me into this, I’d be right there with her. It’s over the top, but it’s meant to be, violent and gruesome and downright evil, and it still manages to be funny in places and empowering too as Jade re-invents herself from victim to killer.

The plot is a little predictable (or maybe I just know Macbeth way, way too well, it is my favourite play and I love Macbeth retellings) but in a way I liked that. I saw a twist coming about 75% of the way through and was frantically praying I was wrong as I raced into the conclusion.

This book was a wild, fucked up read, and I hope there’s more from Hannah Capin coming. I’ll be adding Dead Queen’s Club to my to buy list as soon as I can find a UK link to it.