Review: Hannah Capin – Foul is Fair

Foul is Fair
Hannah Capin

Elle and her coven rule their high school in a mean girls’ sort of manner. All of that changes after Elle is gang raped at a party and she vows to get revenge. Her rich parents pay for her to change schools, and she hatches a plan with her friends Mads, Jenny, and Summer to kill them all. And she’s going to use the Goldenest boy of all to do it.

This book left me with an incredibly bad mouth feel. I felt violated and unsatisfied, and frankly a bit offended! This is a vague retelling of Macbeth, but Macbeth was time-appropriate, and Shakespeare! Death and madness are no longer ‘normal’ (and therapy will help with avoiding both of those things).

What irritated me about this novel was that Elle is clearly emotionally damaged, and emotionally unstable. But her parents don’t bother to get her help, and let her run along with her nasty plans. Elle keeps revisiting the rape in her mind, and is suffering from PTSD. If you’re someone who is sensitive or triggered by this kind of content, definitely don’t even read the blurb of it.

So the moral of the story? If you’re rich, basically you can get away with anything you bloody well want to. Your best friend has a lawyer dad after all – he’ll get you out of any consequences. I’m not really a fan of the death penalty in general, so why would I be keen on Elle plotting (and succeeding) at killing the entire Golden sports team? I’d have been much more impressed if she had found a way to torture them and inflict the same fate!

Feminism without filter? Unapologetic feminism? Why does feminism have to be so brutal to be effective? Feminism is “the advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes”. That’s not what I see here. There’s no equality of the sexes, and there’s not really any women’s rights. There’s just one petty teenage girl killing off her abusers.

I was trapped under my sleeping wife on an aeroplane with no access to other books – so I finished reading it. But lest that make you think it’s worth reading, I’m giving it 1 star even though I didn’t give up. Oh, and did I mention the horrifically pink and yellow cover with a dripping blood red lipstick? Shudder.