Reviews

Listen i wanted to give up on this till like the last three chapters, so..
It felt like 11 chapters of random mess, sport, and then finally plot at the very end.

brookesgoodbooks's review against another edition

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dark funny lighthearted fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

rychelereads's review against another edition

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3.0

[contemporary, dark, trauma, sports, new adult, found family]

This is an absolute train-wreck that you can't look away from UNTIL you realize its actually a sports anime in written form, then it all makes complete sense.

The characters are archetypal and all of them have intensely traumatic backgrounds. I did feel like the author was attempting to one-up herself with every background detail reveal. The general feel of all the foxes including Coach Wymack is "I'm hard cuz my life is hard." The violence is largely unwarranted and you have to suspend disbelief for much of the character descriptions:

Spoiler

Andrew's entire being but especially the knives strapped to his wrists at all times; Neil's disguise of contacts and hair dye being enough; many etc.

. I love the found family storyline but cannot for the life of me understand how anyone in the book survived this particular brand of dysfunction. Might I also add that each character on the Foxes, due to recruitment criteria, have extreme trauma and are essentially dealing with shit, but the amount of enabling and further abuse they throw at each other makes absolutely no sense. I get that hurt people hurt people, but damn.

Until we finally got the obligatory explanation of the game Exy, I was completely lost. The author references the sport heavily before we see a game or get a better explanation and each one of them made me roll my eyes because I had no clue how to relate. I also thought this game was played on skates the entire time and couldn't decide if it was ice skates or roller blades

Spoiler

it's neither these fools are simply running

.

The writing itself is okay. The descriptive sentences can be short and disjointed, and they don't always flow nicely. Couple that with the extreme angst of the plot, characters, and dialogue and it can be pretty stifling to get through some bits.

BUT I SIMPLY NEED MORE
I am obsessed with the Foxes and would love to know more about the enemy characters and the other teams. The games end up being the best written scenes in the book and I simply can't get enough. This book promises gang involvement and more secrets and history reveals which I NEED. Once you accept that this is a written sort of anime, all of these very anime things are easy to accept: the extreme disregard for reality without magical realism, the angst, the heavy mood swings, the absolute detail put in for character visual description, the end-all-be-all atmosphere of every encounter, the list goes on.

margrietvkuijen's review against another edition

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dark

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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