Thank you for visiting my review for Hannah Capin’s Foul is Fair, which is part of the blog tour leading up to its publication on February 18, 2020. I would also like to thank Wednesday Books for extending an invitation to the blog tour and providing me with an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review—thank you so much for this opportunity!
About the book and its creator
Hannah Capin’s Foul is Fair is a bloody, thrilling revenge fantasy for the girls who have had enough. Golden boys beware: something wicked this way comes.
Jade and her friends Jenny, Mads, and Summer rule their glittering LA circle. Untouchable, they have the kind of power other girls only dream of. Every party is theirs and the world is at their feet. Until the night of Jade’s sweet sixteen, when they crash a St. Andrew’s Prep party. The night the golden boys choose Jade as their next target.
They picked the wrong girl.
Sworn to vengeance, Jade transfers to St. Andrew’s Prep. She plots to destroy each boy, one by one. She’ll take their power, their lives, and their control of the prep school’s hierarchy. And she and her coven have the perfect way in: a boy named Mack, whose ambition could turn deadly.
Jade and her friends Jenny, Mads, and Summer rule their glittering LA circle. Untouchable, they have the kind of power other girls only dream of. Every party is theirs and the world is at their feet. Until the night of Jade’s sweet sixteen, when they crash a St. Andrew’s Prep party. The night the golden boys choose Jade as their next target.
They picked the wrong girl.
Sworn to vengeance, Jade transfers to St. Andrew’s Prep. She plots to destroy each boy, one by one. She’ll take their power, their lives, and their control of the prep school’s hierarchy. And she and her coven have the perfect way in: a boy named Mack, whose ambition could turn deadly.
Hannah Capin is the author of Foul is Fair and The Dead Queens Club, a feminist retelling of the wives of Henry VIII. When she isn’t writing, she can be found singing, sailing, or pulling marathon gossip sessions with her girl squad. She lives in Tidewater, Virginia. If you are interested in following her on social media, she is on both Twitter and Instagram as @tldaaollf.
Foul is Fair buy link: https://wednesdaybooks.com/the-real-deal/foul-is-fair/
Review
Full disclosure, Foul is Fair is not for the feint of heart. It is intense, gritty, dark, explorative in its storytelling, and it tells the tale of so many women through the ages. But Jade refuses to be just another one of those women, violated by men—or more aptly, boys who like to think they are men as they hide behind their parents’ status and wealth. Jade may have been bested in a single instance, incapacitated by a date-rape drug on her sixteenth birthday, taken to a room by certain players of the St. Andrew’s Prep lacrosse team, a room that flashes bright white and surreal in her mind again and again throughout the novel, haunting her despite her every effort to remain strong in the after of her trauma. And she does remain strong despite those flashbacks; they serve as reminders to her of what those golden boys did, her purpose in pursuing them, and ultimately besting them at their own game. But she isn’t a victim or a survivor, labels that a counselor tries to pin on her.
“Why do you need a word for it?” I ask, all mocking uncertainty.
“I don’t—I don’t know.” She’s grasping and too nervous. “What do you mean?”
My smile is lethal. “I mean those boys didn’t turn me into anything I wasn’t before.”
She is power. She is focused. She is wronged but not wallowing in the past trauma. And she has chosen vengeance as her course of action, one that leads her to transfer to St. Andrew’s Prep, into the thick of the lacrosse team’s complicated and dynamic fellowship. No, she isn’t a victim or a survivor—she’s a wolf in sheep’s skin, retribution singing in her blood and justice at her lips.
This book is as if Shakespeare’s Macbeth was remade in a collaboration between the creators of the Cruel Intentions, Mean Girls, and the Kill Bill movies. It is fast, quick, cruel, calculating, and nothing like I’ve seen in YA before. It was jarring to pick up the story and begin, because Capin does not hold back for a second. The assault happens right out the gate, and the writing breathes with Jade’s mix of angry strength and the trauma that fights to bring her down. In the immediate aftermath, within hours of the assault, her internal dialogue says, “I’m not crying. I don’t fucking cry,” and she begins the process of reclaiming who she is, the girl she was before that night began: she removes her jade-colored contacts; she dies her hair back to black (bleached blonde for her sixteenth birthday and the party she and her friends crashed); she cuts her hair short using a knife from her sister’s wedding silver (from a marriage that ended and left her sister miserable); and she trims her broken nails (mangled during the assault) and has them redone shortly thereafter. But even more importantly, aside from the physical transformation, is her choice to now go by her middle name Jade instead of Elle, the nickname for her given name Elizabeth. The physical transformation allows her to step back into who she was beforehand, but changing her name is the first significant indicator that Jade isn’t as okay as the cold and controlled appearance she puts on. She acts as if she is simply resetting herself to a time before, but she is doing so much more than that—she is creating a new identity, one that she can craft into whatever she wants, one that she can use to seek her revenge.
However, Capin is brilliant in how she balances Jade’s newly crafted identity with the trauma she is trying to tamp down, slipping through when she is most vulnerable, and Capin specifically has those who most intimately know Jade as participants in these moments where the effects of the trauma peek through. Jade prepares a bath for herself one evening when she lets herself mourn the loss of her hair from the before and her mother silently joins her, and without a single bit of dialogue we see the love and care in every motion as her mother runs her fingers through Jade’s hair. Even as her mother sees the bruising on Jade’s neck for the first time.
—and my hands come up out of the water so fired-red I can feel it all the way to the bone.
My fingers find hers over the dark blue spots that mark my skin.
Capin does what I love most, and it packs such a punch that I couldn’t put the book down: she shows us. She lets the characters’ actions speak for them, because no matter how much Jade says she is fine, that Jade internally and externally claims she is strong, she is a young woman who has experienced violence that wounds deeply, far deeper than the skin, and Jade’s actions tell the truth of how she really is.
As a revenge fantasy novel where a wronged woman shows her male attackers that she won’t stay down, I enjoyed the inclusion of a male character who contrasted with the boys who violated her and stood as her equal. Mack—Jade’s ticket into the St. Andrew’s Prep lacrosse team dynamics—may be another jock, friends of those who violated her, but he is set far apart from them. He isn’t part of the inner circle at first, unaware of what they do to young women at parties, and when he does eventually find out, his actions show his shock and disgust. Then when one of the inner circle refuses to call her by her name, Mack refuses to allow him to continue dehumanizing her.
“Jade,” Mack says again, half-turning toward me. “Her name I Jade.”
“Jade,” says Duffy. It catches in his throat: half in scorn and half in fear.
“She’s not a damn prize. She chose me.”
The presence of a young man who refuses to remain complicit in the subtle and blatant injustices toward female characters is refreshing and what I want to see more of this in books.
I give Foul is Fair 4.5 out of 5 stars for the amazing storytelling that hits you right in the gut with all its grit. And there is a lot of grit in these pages, mixed with a frankness we need in books to help unveil and combat toxic masculinity and violence against women. Change isn't made by those who keep hush-hush and keep to the status quo. Be loud like this book. Be daring like Jade, because it is her--your--right to exist in a world where you are safe, where you don't have to worry about unknowingly consuming a date-rape drug at a party, where women don't have to reinvent themselves to get away from trauma. Where women aren't targeted and violated at the whim of men around them, men who get away with this disgusting behavior because those women "were asking for it." No one asks for this. No amount of makeup or exposed skin asks this.
The only reason I deducted half a star from my rating is because there were a few times where the formatting of the writing didn't work for me, and that format persisted throughout the entirety of the novel. I believe the intent was to jar the reader, just as much as rape is a jarring experience that alters a person's entire perspective. While I can understand that reasoning, if that was Capin's intent, it just didn't work for me the entire time. This is 100% a personal preference and I know there may be individuals who are completely unfazed by this formatting choice. Don't let this one aspect I didn't like dissuade you from picking this book up. It is well worth your time for all the other reasons I explained above, and more.
The only reason I deducted half a star from my rating is because there were a few times where the formatting of the writing didn't work for me, and that format persisted throughout the entirety of the novel. I believe the intent was to jar the reader, just as much as rape is a jarring experience that alters a person's entire perspective. While I can understand that reasoning, if that was Capin's intent, it just didn't work for me the entire time. This is 100% a personal preference and I know there may be individuals who are completely unfazed by this formatting choice. Don't let this one aspect I didn't like dissuade you from picking this book up. It is well worth your time for all the other reasons I explained above, and more.
*Please note: This book includes mentions of sexual assault, rape culture, and violence, as well as an abusive relationship, a suicide attempt, and a brief scene with transphobic bullying. Proceed cautiously if any of this content matter is triggering for you.*