“Hope was a dangerous, disquieting thing, but he thought perhaps he liked it.”
It’s hard to for me to do a spoiler free review for this first book but I’ll try. I’m going to leave the OMG stuff until the next review.
(So I’ll start with a trigger warning; this book contains violence, drink, drugs, sex, swearing, abuse and mental health. It’s milder in The Foxhole Court but the violence amps up throughout the rest of the series.)
The Foxhole Court begins with Neil being given the opportunity to play the (fictional) sport of Exy for the Palmetto Foxes at Palmetto University. Think a cross of lacrosse and very violent hockey. The Foxes are a team of talented misfits on the verge of dropping out of their league. I use the word team loosely, as the Foxes are hardly what you would call a united group at the beginning. They all have a past, however, Neil has secrets of his own. He has been on the run from his crime boss father for years and has recently lost his mother. Where it gets interesting is that Neil recognizes one of the Foxes, former champion Kevin, from a time in his past, but does Kevin realise who Neil really is? For someone who’s always been looking over his shoulder, the story sees Neil struggling with the choice of fight or flight, finding somewhere he could belong for the first time and something worth caring about. His arrival has an effect on all of the Foxes and the team. By the end of the book you’ll be going straight on to book two, you only have to read reviews on Amazon to see I wasn’t the only one that stayed up all night binge reading!
At first, I wondered where all of these characters were going to fit, and who was who, but their personalities come through and make it easy to distinguish. Each one is important to the development in one way or another. By the second book I cared about each one to some degree. Whilst the writing in this isn’t completely polished, what the author has achieved in making me feel made up for it.
I will say it right here, I’m not a sports fan. You do not need to be to enjoy this story. If you are into sports however, you are going to be interested in the team dynamic and the match scenes. The Exy match scenes held my interest, and I liked how not every match was written about in great detail, just the important ones. These action scenes were done in a way that made me feel like I was watching from the side, and as it’s a fictional sport, it didn’t matter that I don’t understand every sports term. Team spirit is catching.
What I liked most was how the reader was drip-fed information about the different characters pasts throughout the book. It keeps you reading as you are intrigued to find out what’s going on and why they are behaving the way they do, in particular with Neil. It’s written in a way where you’re not confused with what’s going on, but you are still sort of in the dark about some motives and needing to know more.
I also loved the characters, and what kept me reading was trying to find out if any of them had any redeemable qualities. Stick with me here; the Foxes are a messed up bunch, and from the start do not seem the nicest of folks, but as the book goes on, they seem more human. As they grow on Neil, they grow on the reader.
I would recommend this book to those who like character driven novels, who enjoy a cat-and-mouse mystery and secrets, and to those who like finding out what makes people tick. This book is raw. It’s not sunshine and rainbows. This is not for those that can’t handle troubled and at times unlikeable characters. This story isn’t for those that are overly critical of plot points, the plot with Neil’s family back story can seem far-fetched at first, but if you were to continue with the series you would see how it falls into place.
The first in the series is currently free on Amazon, and the others are low priced. They are not particularly long books either, so with that I think you should all take a chance on the Foxes.
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