Book Review: The Foxhole Court by Nora Sakavic

I’m unsure how to rate this really. On the one hand it was a quick read, and I enjoyed it, but it had an awful lot of flaws. 

The basic premise is runaway Neil gets picked up by a major university Exy team, who are all a bunch of misfits just like him. Exy is some kind of made up sport that’s a cross between lacrosse and football, and while they can’t seem to play without fighting, there’s a whole lot of trouble in Neil’s past just ready to catch up with him and he’ll need his teammates help to stay hidden. 

The plot and pace were both a little all over the place, and the writing feels very ‘new writer’. There’s no nuances to it, no subtlety that could have propelled this into an exciting read, and there’s a lot of idle chit chat. There’s also only one Exy game in the whole book. I found this disappointing as that section alone was more entertaining and exciting than the rest of the book put together. There’s lots of moping around from all the characters, lots of fighting and going to random clubs without having any clear agenda as to why other than to be sexually assaulted, and there’s lots of conversations using highly derogatory and offensive terms which I was deeply offended by. But not a lot of action, or development of the plot. By 75% of the way in, nothing had really happened and the characters were acting in exactly the same way as they were in the beginning. 

Also, not being from America, all my American sports knowledge comes from watching The Mighty Ducks and Field of Dreams as a youth. So unless there’s a giant corn field with the ghost of a dad in it, or someone’s attempting a flying ‘V’, I have no clue about sports like this. I have no concept of the world of collegiate sport and how it works. As it’s not elaborated on here I sometimes didn’t really understand what was going on. Sport scholarships aren’t really a ‘thing’ here. There’s also no discussion about what Exy actually is, leaving this very open to the reader to interpret. Again this left me quite confused at times as the characters start kitting themselves out in protective gear and fling sticks around. 

I suppose the best thing about the story is the complex relationship between all the different characters. They bounce off each other well, like a massive dysfunctional family, and all have a distinct voice. Andrew in particular is incredibly interesting and complicated to understand. His apathy for the sport he’s so good at and his intense relationship with Kevin is troubling and intriguing. Hs time with Neil is especially heated and full of an undercurrent of danger and tension, and I’d be interested to see where it leads. Dan is also a great character, acting as captain it’s her job to keep the group from tearing each other apart, acting as part mother hen and part dictator. Some of the others I found to be less rounded. Renee never seems to say much, and I felt was woefully underused given that she seems to take everything in and can see right through Neil. Allison and Seth are also largely underused, with Seth just coming across as a hothead most of the time. <spoiler>This makes his death by ‘overdose’ at the end largely uninspiring and underwhelming for me, as I wasn’t particularly vested in his character. We also never see Allison’s reaction to it, which would have been far more emotive than Andrew’s group, leaving the ending incomplete for me </spoiler>. 

As I say, this was a quick read and I enjoyed it for the mix of characters. But the plot would really need to ramp up for me to consider reading the next book.