I found the writing style quite hard to follow, and wasn’t always sure whether Jade was imagining things or retelling them. That said, the story is compelling, if somewhat far fetched, but once I made the Macbeth connection it made sense a bit more, as otherwise I was struggling that no one anywhere appeared to have a conscious, apart from Mack. If I’m honest I’m still not 100% sure what happened in the lead up to the end, with Piper, Lilia and Jade/Elle’s hospitalisation, but I did enjoy it and it certainly kept my attention.

This was a fantastically dark revenge tale, I loved the over dramatic twisty prep school way that this story is told. I loved the writing and characterizations and how mean girls are celebrated for doing what needs to be done.

Thanks so much to Netgalley and Penguin for the opportunity to review Foul is Fair.

I really enjoyed this Macbeth retelling. The addition of the #MeToo storyline, with a dark thriller (another review mentions Kill Bill which is a spot on comparison!) had me hooked.

I truly felt for Elle/Jade toward the end of the book, although she was a very difficult character to get on with in the beginning! I would’ve loved to have learned more about Lilia and her story as it seemed to be brought in when needed - if you got rid of that character story altogether, the overall plot wouldn’t really be changed.

The writing is a bit melodramatic and I was definitely confused for a few chapters as to whether this had an element of fantasy within it - and I’m not sure whether I’m certain now. 

Another smaller issue (for the publisher) is that any “ff”’s didn’t show up in my e-book - hopefully that will be corrected in the final version.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

I did enjoy reading this book, though I found the writing quite melodramatic. As a modern retelling of Shakespeare's Macbeth, Caplin explores what might happen if Lady Macbeth's motivation was a #metoo story. Prep school, as an entitled and privileged environment, is the perfect place to set this kind of story, and Caplin does make the retelling enjoyable, but for me it's at the expense of believable characters. The book is highly stylised so this may be part of the point, but I wanted a bit more depth. As a revenge retelling though, it does work.

This is a feisty retelling of Macbeth set against the background of a gang rape at an American college, St Andrews. Ellie, the Lady Macbeth in this version, gatecrashes a party with her gang, Jenny, Summer and Mads. Ellie's drink is spiked and she is brutally raped and the book is about her seeking and taking revenge. Macbeth? The rapists are called Duncan and Banks and the person Ellie procures to murder them is called Mack.

Ellie changes her name to Jade, signs on at the College where this happened and begins to plot. Her gang play the part of the witches, neatly using text messages to plant ideas in the minds of these relatively dim but swaggering boys. For the most part, it all works out and there are several bloody deaths while Mack has to be bullied and cajoled to keep to the sticking point!

It's a clever idea but a little hard to sustain. For a start, everyone involved is relatively young, they are rich and have cars, their parents are conveniently absent for the most part, and the college simply provides a background seemingly not much worried about all these murders. You need a fair bit of willing suspension of disbelief to go along with all this!

The style is constantly sharp, brittle edged, and there's a lot of profanity, blood and self harming apart from the murders, but it's a good representation of utterly vengeful rage and if you can accept the metaphors, a tendency to miss out the odd linking word and a lot of blood, bone, flames and stone it's a compelling read. Hannah Capin also drops in a bit of additional Shakespearean reference and language along the way just to keep the story rolling.

Another thing in its favour is the topicality of appalling behaviour in American fraternities and the misogyny of 'college boys'. It will make some people want to cheer the witches on!  Anyway, if you enjoyed Macbeth (and it certainly helps to know something about the Scottish play) then there is no guarantee that this will appeal but it's a clever conceit, consistently delivered and it might yet make a series on Netflix! If it does, you can always say that you read it first!

I don't often step away from books I'm struggling with, but I found this intolerable to read and had to stop at only 8% in. I requested Foul is Fair because I thought it sounded very dark and exciting. I thought it would be fun. However, I found the writing style to be terrible and the characters unlikable. The descriptions, dialogue and actions seem stupid and gratuitous. Edgy just the sake of it which comes off as rather cringeworthy to read. It also seems wholly unrealistic. I do enjoy YA Fiction, but sometimes I'm just certainly not the target audience and I feel that this is one of those times. Despite my disdain for the book, I imagine many teens will actually love it, including the way it's written.

Foul is Fair embedded itself into my heart. This is a book that I won't be forgetting anytime soon and it became an instant favourite. 

Jade Khanjara and her three best friends rule their glittering LA circle. They decide how the party ends - every night but one. The night four boys spike Jade's drink, lock her in a room and brutally attack her. The night they try to ruin her.

But they chose the wrong girl. Certain that the boys will face no consequences, Jade and her friends take vengeance into their own hands. There's no mercy left: and now Jade won't rest until she gets bloody satisfaction.

This book burns with righteous rage, so much so that you can almost feel the heat searing off the pages and into your soul. It grapples with our misogynistic society and rape culture through the lens of a modern day Macbeth re-telling wherein Lady Macbeth takes on her own Taratino-eque revenge thriller. 

Jade is such an excellent protagonist, complex and nuanced. You can't help but root for her, despite her manipulative and destructive nature, as after all the boys brought it on themselves to an extent. 

Capin's writing is exquisite - all at once lyrical, fantastical and devastating honest and raw. I was highlighting so many quotes of this sumptuous writing and will be doing more when I buy my finished copy. 

Foul is Fair is a primal scream of a book that you cannot help but read. 

Full review will be up on my blog nearer publication date.

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.

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.

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.

My Kindle refused to accept any typing of “ff” in this book, leading the name Duffy to read as ‘Du Y’. It took me until 19% through this book to realise that Du Y was not a Chinese name that I hadn’t heard before, but that the book was actually a Macbeth retelling.

This book knows it’s fantastical, that in real life these events could never occur, but it’s an amazing read, with the lyricalness of a true Shakespeare play. Elle/Jade was a wonderful character to read – ruthless and angry and manipulative, an easy character to fuck up by a lesser writer. Capin makes her sympathetic, even as she murders her way through St Andrews.

Side note, lesbian trans characters? In my Shakespeare retellings? It’s more likely than you think.

Overall, I give this book 4 stars. I couldn’t put it down (and read it under my desk at work), but I did find that some of the characters blended into one, with Jenny and Summer serving the same purpose, much like Banks/Duncan – It took me a while to figure out which boy was which. Still, it was so unique, and I would definitely recommend.
Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC.

This book will absolutely find its audience. And they will eat it up. I, however, am not the right reader. I find it nearly unreadable it is trying so hard. No one talks like this, no one thinks like this. This reads like a comic book without the advantage of the form. It is all soap opera cutaways and PLL-level-over-the-top and it is unbearable.

DNF @ 20%
Thanks Penguin for approving my request to read and review this title. I'm not generally the biggest fan of YA fiction but I requested this one thinking I may like it based on the dark subject matter and the rave reviews that I was reading and hearing.
Unfortunately, this one just wasn't for me. I wasn't on board with the writing style and because I found the writing style so odd, I just wasn't connecting with the story.
Again, thanks for giving me the opportunity to try this one.
Due to the fact that I DNF this book, I won't be writing and publishing any reviews on social media.
I'm looking forward to reading and reviewing more of your titles in the future.

Netgalley marketed this as ‘feminist, man-hating filth’ so of course I had to read it. I hadn’t seen anything else about it, so I was delighted to realise it was a modern, feminist slant on Macbeth. 

I would say it’s not actually super feminist, mostly because these are young teens who still berate other women for being different kinds of women to them. But apart from that, it's wonderful. And not TERFy, which is even better.

It’s always fun to watch chaos, and chaos this is. I love a good revenge fantasy and I have a lot of love for Lady Macbeth and here she lets loose her anger and frustrations. Is it realistic? Hell no, but who cares. These women have a plot and a plan and will do anything to make it happen. 

My only (minor) gripe is that the MC is lightly coded as South Asian (which yay inclusion), yet using only a hair change, coloured contacts and contouring makeup makes herself completely unrecognisable to everyone. I’m not sure how many other South Asian’s there are meant to be at this super posh school, but I doubt it’s that many that she can disappear and be forgotten/unrecognised so easily. 

TW: for sexual assault, blood, violence, murder.

There are plot spoilers in this review.  

I’ve seen this book described as a ‘feminist modern re-imagining of Shakespeare’s Macbeth’ and I’ll start by admitting that I’ve previously struggled with reading a book based entirely on re-using the plot of an existing book but changing the setting (I couldn’t get along with Jo Nesbo’s 'Macbeth' for that reason).    It also made me think of Helen Zahavi’s 'Dirty Weekend', which was published many years ago and was also about a woman seeking revenge – but better done I thought at the time.  

In 'Foul is Fair' the main character is raped at a party, having been given drugs to make her compliant/sleepy.  She and her friends then decide to exact their murderous revenge on the boys involved – or even involved by dint of knowing but doing nothing.  

To be honest, unlike some of the other readers who have reviewed this book very positively, I found the writing rather clunky and the prose more purple than poetic.      When the first boy linked to the rape dies, it just seemed implausible to me – a) that he’d be murdered for his misdemeanour and b) the response to it from all concerned, particularly his friends and the school.   The strength of the bond in the coven also seemed unlikely – there’s supporting your friends in troubled times but most would draw the line at planning to murder not just one person but several.

Foul is Fair by Hannah Capin, published by @penguinukbooks - digital arc courtesy of @netgalley 

Foul is Fair will be released 16th Jan 2020.


Content and trigger warnings for this book for rape and sexual assault/violence. 

This has been described as a ‘feminist modern re-imagining of Shakespeare's Macbeth...part Cruel Intentions and Kill Bill'. I can definitely feel the Shakespeare in this story, it has all the elements of a classic tragedy. More so than that though, this book is the perfect slasher movie. Unfurling over the course of one week, bloody gory murder reigns supreme over St Andrews Prep school in LA. 

This was particularly brutal for a book that is considered YA/teen fiction - personally I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone younger than the protagonist Jade, who is 16.  Due to the culture that we live in, the opening premise of this story a gang/date rape, was horrible, but not at all surprising. I’ve read quite a lot of books based around this (Nina is Not Okay by Shappi Khorsandi, Asking For It by Louise O’Neill etc) but Foul is Fair takes an interesting twist on the usual storyline.
This is the first time I’ve read a book like this, where the protagonist just says ‘I’ll murder them’. And then it starts, a story of justice and revenge, sociopathic teenagers and deceit. 

This made me think of Ari Aster’s film ‘Midsommar’- at the end, all I could think was ‘Get it, girl’.

Thanks to Netgalley and Penguin Books for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

"Foul is Fair" seems to have polarised opinion and after reading this book I can understand why. I totally understand the comparisons with Macbeth, Cruel Intentions et al., but for me this is a straightforward revenge tale with some edgy writing and original imagery. As for it being a feminist-battle cry... well, I'm dubious about the novel's credentials in this respect. It seems to me that any novel that pits men against women these days is tagged with the feminist trope. This is either meant as a complement to the author's profound meditations on the subject, or, as a criticism of female-centeredness, usually made, admittedly, by some men who feel that their masculinity is threatened in some way by such overt feminist themes in public discourse. My criticism of the novel's so-called feminist credentials is to do with neither of these opinions. More, that I just do not see its relevance full stop. This is a revenge tale, albeit a satisfying one, but one, nevertheless, that has been written about for years without being politicised in such a way. Whilst feminism is admittedly a contested term, it is generally agreed that its central tents revolve around the advocacy of women's rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes. I'm not sure how "Foul is Fair" fits in with this contention, but I suspect this is due to the vagaries of 'feminism' in the climate of the  #MeToo movement. For conscious-raising on the subject of sexual violence against women, this is not a great example. I would recommend instead, Gabriel Tallent’s debut novel, "My Absolute Darling",  "The Female Persuasion" by Meg Wolitzer, or,  "When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait Of The Writer As A Young Wife" by Meena Kandasamy.

Fine as a revenge-tale but please stop with the feminist battle-cry nonsense.

Sweet Revenge for the Modern Era

Loved how this book didn’t mess about and just got into the action.  Straight off the bat, it gave me a whole Cruel Intentions vibe and added a touch of The Craft for good measure - all teen girl kick ass.  In a world that gave us the Brock Turner farse, we deserve this over the top revenge book.  

When a group of prep boys choose the wrong girl to target at a party we are taken along for an all-consuming journey of revenge and it’s a delightfully dark ride.   For such a disturbing tale it’s beautifully written.  I don’t tend to like things with any sort of retelling of Shakespeare hints (Macbeth in this case) or girly teen YA but this is in its own league of powerful storytelling that sets it apart.  I had a strong feeling of where it was going but I wouldn’t have missed the ride for anything.

When 4 boys the"golden boys" of At Andrews School rape a 16 year old girl at Duncan's house the head of the pack or King as he prefers, little did they know they picked the wrong target. Take is always wrong always vile the courts may not feel with it very well but .... For Jade she is no normal girl she will not let it go and the following Monday its all change for Jade and her pack Mad's, Summer, & Jenny, loyal and strong no matter what they throw at each other..
Jade teams up with Mack and you will have to read to see who he is and how strong or weak he is but you will want to know because well I will let Jade explain  
I'm guessing this is aimed at a younger audience than myself but the guts and blood may be not. But if you like thrillers that deal with suspence and some twists then this could be for you. There is plenty of 🔥 fire in Jade and feeling that will grab you and no matter how far she goes they made her the victim but little did they know that gates can swing both ways, special the beautiful green, no I won't say it gives too much away but yes get this and I'm guessing you could be hooked you will be engaged the rest will depend on you.

Edgy for edginess' sake; if you want a book with a diverse cast, good POC rep, beautiful writing, to be lost in the pure revenge fantasy and don't need stories to make much sense, you'll probably love this.

This book was like a fast-paced feminist revenge tale and retelling of Macbeth from the perspective of the Lady Macbeth character, the witches forming her coven.  When Elle is assaulted at a posh, high school party in Los Angeles, she and her friends become vigilante angels of death to exact revenge on the people who hurt her.

I read this book in less than three days.  The sentences are concise and sharp, the chapters short, and the story is well written and moves forward at a quick pace - I was never bored, I never skimmed ahead to see what was going to happen, I took the story as it came.  The language has a beautiful, poetic quality, while always being clear and easy to understand.  

This was definitely dark, and the author has a full-page of content advisory notes on her website, so it is not going to be for everyone.  For me, it was love.  I had such a hard time putting this book down.  It was smart and entertaining, and just fed my need as a woman in the #metoo era to just burn everything down (metaphorically).  I can't even think of ways to describe how much I love this book with slipping into cliches.

Recommended for any person who'd love to see the patriarchy destroyed.

Four LA girls. Queen bees.

Until one night Jade is attacked by four boys.

But Jade and her friends want revenge.

With the characters unrealistic and unsympathetic, the plot (such as it is) is overblown and ridiculous