If the mean girls of Megan Abbott and Kara Thomas’ books teamed up with Regina George and the cast of Heathers in a retelling of Macbeth, you’d have this amazingly insane book. (And that description doesn’t even really do it justice.)
Elle and her “coven” of best friends—together they’re a quartet of obscenely wealthy, beautiful California girls—decide to celebrate her 16th birthday by crashing a party being thrown by the popular crowd at St. Andrews, a tony Catholic school. That night, something happens to Elle at the hands of a group of dazzlingly handsome, privileged lacrosse players. Something awful. Something for which she and her coven vow to seek revenge.
"I can take every single thing they tried to ruin and make it mine again. Make it a weapon that cuts them down and bleeds them dry."
She reinvents herself as Jade, a new, bewitching, take-no-prisoners student at St. Andrews. She infiltrates the popular crowd and begins to work her plan of turning them all against each other, and finds one boy, her king, to set it all in motion.
There’s a lot here—rape, violence, drugs, blood—but Capin does such an excellent job weaving this story together. I seriously couldn’t read this one fast enough. It is really, really dark, and of course, utterly preposterous in places, but it will stick in my mind for a long, long time.
(True confession time: I never read Macbeth, so other than the similarities in character names, I'm not sure exactly how many parallels there are, but that didn't bother me anyway!)
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