Golden Boys Beware

November 1, 2019

Gr 10 Up-Kids are on their own in the world of the wealthy in Southern California; their posses are tight, and "get even" is their code. Elle's "coven"-Mads, Summer, and Jenny-have been bullies and vigilantes since eighth grade. On her 16th birthday, Elle decides it would be fun to crash a prep school party with the coven where they know no one. She's drugged and raped by four football players who've done this before and whose dominance among peers, and loyalty to each other, makes them feel invincible. The author uses the culture of denial surrounding sexual assault effectively: despite a mounting body count, no one figures Elle, Jenny, Summer, and Mads to be the killers because they're girls and, it's assumed, incapable of such pitiless revenge. Gory scenes of death and dying are the norm here, although the rape scene itself is not explicit. The author offers a helpful "content advisory" on her website for more details about potentially sensitive material. The book is laced with profanity, too. VERDICT This revenge fantasy told from the point of view of a rape survivor will shock and awe some readers. Suitable for mature audiences.-Georgia Christgau, LaGuardia Community College, Long Island City, NY

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December 1, 2019
A teen and her best friends exact revenge on the prep school boys who raped her. Elle, Mads, Jenny, and Summer are wealthy Los Angeles teens who crash a prep school party on Elle's 16th birthday. After four boys spike Elle's drink and rape her, the girls decide to kill them. Using her middle name, Jade, Elle enrolls in the boys' private school and launches an elaborate scheme of manipulation and retaliation, choosing golden boy Mack, who is in their friend group, as her scapegoat for murder. But when Jade falls for Mack, her friends start to question her loyalties, and she must decide how far she'll go. Rhythmic, propulsive prose drives this bloody retelling of Macbeth at a relentless pace all the way to its violent end. Readers will find little moral or emotional complexity in these pages and hardly any character development or examination of the self-destructive power of vengeance. What they will find, after they leave their disbelief at the door, is a steadfast sisterhood repaying heedless assault with red-hot rage; and perhaps, in the age of #MeToo, that is enough to begin with. Jade's father is an Indian immigrant (her mother's ethnicity is not mentioned), dark-skinned transgender Mads has a Latinx name, Jenny is implied Korean, and Summer is bisexual. Besides a backstory involving transphobic bullying, none of these identities go much beyond name and appearance. Other key characters are white. Intense, implausible, and impossible to put down. (Fiction. 14-18)

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December 16, 2019
A young woman chooses “avenger” over “victim” or “survivor” in this take on Macbeth for the #MeToo era by Capin (The Dead Queens Club). After 16-year-old narrator Elle Khanjara is drugged and raped by a group of prep school boys at an L.A. party, she determines to handle the situation herself. Requesting that her parents not contact the authorities, she asks her father, a connected plastic surgeon, to facilitate her transfer to St. Andrew’s Prep, the boys’ school. Taking the entitled young men out herself would be too easy. Elle, now going by her middle name, Jade, plans to bring them down from within, and she launches a scheme devised with her “coven,” close friends Mads, Jenny, and Summer. Nothing short of murder will do, but falling for the boy she’s set up to take the fall isn’t part
of the plan. Elements of
the coven’s elaborately staged scheme are hard to swallow, and a lack of character depth may blunt the impact for some, despite intersectional inclusivity across secondary characters. Still, Capin’s twisty, blood-soaked take on Shakespeare’s play is a propulsive, white-hot juggernaut of vengeance that packs a viscerally satisfying punch. Ages 14–up. Agent: Sarah Burnes, the Gernert Co.

Starred review from January 1, 2020
Grades 10-1 *Starred Review* Violent DelightsWhen we think of violence and women, most of us probably tend to think of violence against women. This is the pairing that's given the most attention: it's what's in the headlines, what's in our entertainment. In crime fiction, women are, most often, the victims; in superhero stories, they're fridged. Slasher movies of the 1970s reacted to a growing cultural acceptance of women's sexuality and autonomy by violently ripping apart female bodies onscreen. When women are given the opportunity to be violent, it's often sexualized and on behalf of the male gaze (Nikita, Black Widow, the femme fatale?all play to the camera) or they're monsters, and punishment is inevitable (Medusa, Lilith, Lady Macbeth).The conversation grows more complex when race enters in?men of color, and especially black men, are often victims of violence, and face much higher consequences for perpetrating it than white men. But for men of a certain background, with certain privileges, violence has no consequence. Violence makes them kings.Shakespeare knew it, and Hannah Capin does, too. In her slick, divisive sophomore novel, she revamps Macbeth as the contemporary scorched-earth story of Jade Khanjara, who is gang-raped by a group of St. Andrew's Prep lacrosse players at a party on her sixteenth birthday. But violence, as they say, begets violence; afterward, Jade cuts her hair and dyes it black, and she and her three best friends?her coven?vow revenge. And because the boys who tried to destroy her?prep school elites?are untouchable by the law or the justice system, Jade knows that revenge means murdering them herself. There are those who may be disturbed by this sort of mutually assured destruction. Surely, they might say, the answer is not to kill off the men. But here Capin raises an interesting, if extreme, counterpoint. Why not, she asks, when women have been dying violently for centuries? In a different sort of novel, Jade wouldn't follow through with her plan. She would lose her nerve as she infiltrates St. Andrew's as a new student, or she would bond with the boy who is the key to her plan?Mack, the golden boy, the lacrosse player who was uninvolved with her rape, but whom she needs in order to murder the others. She would, like Lady Macbeth, falter at the sight of blood on her hands. She would feel the sting of consequence as her plot unwound and the bodies began to fall.But Capin isn't writing that kind of story.Vicious, manipulative Jade will have her critics, but she's unconcerned with likability. Men have been rampaging across Tarantino films for years?hell, any kid who's read a Shakespeare play in an English class has been privy to unchecked male violence. It is jarring to see a 16-year-old girl commit (or conspire to commit) the acts of violence that Jade makes happen, if only because it is so far outside of what we have come to expect. But this isn't a how-to-murder-your-classmates manual; it's a ferocious, frenzied reaction to a world that has, for too long, treated women as collateral damage in stories that have been deemed more important than theirs.Through Jade and her coven?a group that, despite its brutal mission, is fiercely loyal, open to all different ideas of what a woman can be, and not so close that it can't accept someone new?Capin bulldozes through Macbeth, tackling rape culture and those who benefit from it with the claws-out, take-no-prisoners approach of someone who is done with being afraid. Jade's first-person narrative, steeped in rage and drenched, unapologetically, with gore, moves at a relentless pace. The plot is not rooted in any sort of reality; it is a fever dream, a vicious...