Just as Jane Austen retellings are a dime a dozen, Shakespeare’s works have gotten their own second and third lives in popular media. Among them is Hannah Capin’s Foul is Fair, in which a pack of teenage girls with a grudge take on elite prep-school athletes without a care in the world, carrying over all the blood from the Scottish Play and then some.
Jade and her squad—her coven—sneak into a house party held by a student from the elite private school across town. What seems like a fun and somewhat boozy way of celebrating that threshold into late-teenagerhood (and the ability to drive) turns out to be…well, a little more than anyone bargained for. Hours later, Jade staggers out of the party, drugged and assaulted by a group of boys. Her spiked drink wasn’t quite potent enough to keep her from remembering who did what to her, so she sets out for revenge, with the full support of her friends (and, curiously, parents). A little bit of cyber stalking gives her not just their names—Duncan, Duffy, Connor, and Banks—but their positions as jock royalty at the school. A change of hair and eye color at the party means no one will recognize her as she transfers to the school and quickly inserts herself into this clique.
That’s the easy part, as far as revenge goes. Far harder is to get the group to turn on each other. Jade cozies up to Mack, another member of the team who performs just out of the spotlight. Leveraging Mack’s simmering desire for recognition and the rest of the group’s fractured unease around the events of the party, and Jade quickly starts toppling the people who victimized her with minimal blood on her hands. But as she gets closer to the final showdown, things get a little harder, the police are sniffing a little closer, and Jade has to grapple with her growing feelings for Mack, whose guilt in all of this is minimal—or is it? Either way, she’s hell-bent on finishing the job, no matter the consequences.
The female-centered take on Macbeth is almost gleeful in its revenge. With the exception of one death late in the book, every other broken bone and drop of blood is delivered with, at minimum, satisfaction on the part of our Lady Macbeth and her self-described coven. Capin takes pains to make this at least as bloody as the original Shakespeare, and this motivation of revenge gives a cannier edge to the role of the witches. Does the lust for revenge make Jade a more sympathetic character than the power-hungry Lady Macbeth? Does a character need to be sympathetic to be fun to watch?
There’s something transgressive to watching this fast-paced, consequence-lite rampage. Jade is loving it, the coven is loving it, even though near the end you can see both growing a little threadbare. I’ve had more than enough bad experiences because of my gender to understand the impulse to burn it all down. At the same time, does everyone who ends up dead at the end deserve death? Jade’s stated purpose is to ensure the boys who hurt her never hurt anyone else, but the body count goes far beyond the four boys directly involved with her attack. Even excepting the one death she later regrets, the punishment doesn’t always seem justified. For me, that puts it well out of the realm of a girl-power narrative, as is suggested by one of the back-cover blurbs. What makes it more feminist is perhaps the freedom these four female characters feel in behaving badly—a realm that the male characters felt entitled to do before their bloody ends.
Ring Reads 