Foul is Fair by Hannah Capin
Wednesday Books, 2020
ISBN-13: 978-1250239549
Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD
Sixteen year old Elle and her friends Jenny, Summer, and Mads, are glamorous, vicious, daughters of the ultra-rich whose parents have given them a lot of freedom, When the four girls crash a party for the lacrosse team for the elite prep school, St. Andrews, what starts out as fun becomes a lot less so as the girls are separated and most of the lacrosse team colludes in drugging and raping Elle.
But this is not the story of Elle as either a victim or a survivor. This is the story of how Elle plans to kill off every member of the lacrosse team who had any kind of involvement in orchestrating or participating in her rape, backed by her friends, or “coven”. As she looks at a photo of the St. Andrews lacrosse team, she spots one boy who was not involved, and decides she’s going to manipulate him into killing his teammates. Cutting and dyeing her hair, she transfers to St. Andrews to get close to her future victims, and especially, to get close to Mack, the player who didn’t take part, so she can convince him that knocking off his teammates is the right thing to do, and set him up as the fall guy. Even falling in love with him– and she thinks she might be falling in love with him– isn’t enough to take her mind and her heart off vengeance.
Foul and Fair takes its inspiration from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, positioning Elle’s friends as the three witches, Elle as Lady Macbeth, and Mack as Macbeth. Rather than convincing him to kill out of ambition, though, Elle convinces him he is killing out of righteousness. Elle’s murderous anger slashes through the book.
Unfortunately, the scenario of entitled, rich, white guys raping a girl at a party without having to face consequences isn’t an unrealistic one, and certainly Elle’s feelings, and the bonds of her friendships, are strong. But the likelihood of the girls getting away with tormenting and setting up the members of the lacrosse team, especially without getting caught, is something the reader really has to buy into, as is the likelihood of Elle convincing a guy she’s known less than a week to kill his best friend.
Elle is not a sympathetic character (neither is Lady Macbeth, to be fair) although we get to see a few heroic moments in flashbacks to the beginnings of the four girls’ friendships, like her defense of Mads, a trans girl, on the day Mads outed herself at school (Mads is a great character who doesn’t get enough time, and Capin writes her wonderfully). Whatever else they are, Elle and her “coven” have each other’s backs. These four girls, and the way they’re described, although poetic, reveals that they are a pretty terrifying bunch. I’m doubtful that this will appeal to boys, even though it does a pretty good job of laying out the complicity of even those who aren’t directly involved, and they’re the ones who need to see that. But readers looking for a revenge fantasy with sharp teeth won’t be disappointed. Recommended.
Contains: flashbacks to rape, sexual assault, abusive behaviors, bullying, transphobic bullying, brief depictions of suicide, substance abuse, cursing, violence, gore, murder.
The Witching Hour is the first book in the Mayfair Witches series. Sure, it’s long, and it has a gigantic, annoying expository chunk in the middle, but I still find the story addictive and, well, bewitching. Par for the course with Anne Rice, in the next books (Lasher and Taltos) the story gets pretty twisted. But for gothic and erotic supernatural horror, it’s a slam-dunk.
It’s impossible to write about witches without at least a mention of Shakespeare’s literary creations, as they toil and trouble, making predictions that can lead only to disaster. Just as with The Crucible, the play-that-shall-not-be-named has been made into a movie– actually, more than once. The most recent production stars Patrick Stewart (formerly known as Captain Picard of the Starship Enterprise) who is a brilliant Shakespearean actor and only gets better as time passes. If you really want to make required reading of this play a killer experience, there’s no better way than with a live (or filmed, anyway) performance, right at Halloween.
I’ve just discovered Kim Harrison’s Rachel Morgan books and am really enjoying them. It’s not so much that I like Rachel, but she really shows ingenuity in getting out of some crazy scrapes, and she makes friends and allies in the oddest places. Rachel, a witch, lives in Cincinnati in an alternate world where paranormal creatures have “outed” themselves and live in a separate area of the city called The Hollows, with a legal structure parallel to the human legal system. Naturally this leaves a lot of room for chaos, much of which centers on Rachel and her supernatural business partners, who are a hoot, when they’re not being dangerously lethal. Readers who are looking for a fix after finishing the Southern Vampire Mysteries might very well enjoy Kim Harrison. 
There’s just something claustrophobic about small towns, whether they’re isolated in the mountains or gated communities. Once you’re in, it’s hard to escape the supernatural… or the neighbors. That’s what happens in both Chris Bohjalian’s The Night Strangers and Susie Moloney’s Thirteen. In Bohjalian’s novel, a guilt-ridden pilot moves his family into a mountain village only to find that the unfinished basement is haunted by the deceased passengers of the plane he crashed. In addition to his personal ghosts, though, there are hidden dangers to his family from members of the local community as well. In Moloney’s book, the adult daughter of a woman who has recently died returns to settle the estate, only to find herself entangled in the lives of the people living in the suburb in which she grew up– a place where there seem to have been an unusual number of “accidental” deaths, and finds her beliefs tested by the people around her. Where are the witches in an isolated area, when a stranger moves in? Why, they’re all around you.
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