It’s hard to kill a man when everyone’s eyes are on him. Make them love you, make them hate you. I don’t care. Just make them look at you.
― Nora Sakavic, The King’s Men“The court doesn’t care what my name is or where I’m from or where I’ll be tomorrow. It lets me exist as I am.”
― Nora Sakavic, The King’s Men“Everything I needed, you already gave me. You let me stay.”
― Nora Sakavic, The King’s Men
The name of the series is All For The Game (AFTG). I made this the name of my review because it perfectly sums up the essence of this series. Alternative titles I considered were “The ends justify the means,” “What the fuck did I just read?” and “Oh god, really? No no no no no no no,” and “Every content warning imaginable.”
Despite the dire introduction, this series grabbed me by the neck and did not let go.
The Foxhole Court
Neil Josten, an eighteen-year-old runaway and the story’s narrator, is recruited out of high-school to join the Palmetto State Exy team (The Foxes) after his coach sends in a recording of his game.
Neil has been on the run for eight years and expects to create a new identity as soon as he needs it. However, the single bright spot in his fearful life is playing Exy, which is a fictional sport with equipment sort of like lacrosse and with the violence of ice hockey.
Only after the Foxes’ coach, Wymack, agrees to keep Neil’s face and name out of the press, does he agree to come train with the team after he graduates in May.
The first book of this trilogy introduces us to Neil, his teammates, almost all of whom come from abusive situations, and to the world of college Exy. It also introduces us to the main antagonists of the series, the Evermore Ravens from Edgar Allen university, and their mafia kingpins, the Moriyamas.
The main characters are fighting pretty much non-stop, even when they are getting along with one another. There is an exceptional amount of blood and violence, both on and off the court.
The Raven King
In the first book, we learn about the extremely opaque and complicated relationships amongst the Fox Exy team members. Andrew, the most violent and, by order of the courts, heavily medicated goalie, wields the power over his “crew.” Gradually, Neil and Andrew come to an understanding and Neil is accepted into the crew. Neil doesn’t necessarily like or understand Andrew or Kevin, but he knows he has to find a way for the team to work together if they have any chance of winning a single match. Meanwhile, Neil is constantly dogged by his own fears, as the reason for his and his mother’s disappearance eight years ago is finally starting to catch up with him. He has to decide if saving himself for a few more years is worth more than the chance to play Exy. By the end of this book, Neil sacrifices himself to save Kevin and Andrew.
The King’s Men
Fueled by abuse and assault against their team members, the Foxes and their coach continue to push toward the championship. The formerly last-ranked Exy team is climbing the ranks, and with every win comes higher costs. By this point, the understanding between Andrew and Neil has developed into something more, but they continue to dance around one another, showing the other flashes of truth despite Andrew’s apathy and Neil’s wall of self-preservation. The Foxes finally face off against their primary rival. Both Kevin and Neil are forced to face their families, their abusers, and it is not pretty or easy but it is satisfying.
This series is about a fictional sport and that is pretty much it. The relationships and traumatic experiences are gut wrenching. But everything is shared through the lens of how these experiences affect one thing above all else: the game. The detailed sequences of each match were filler for me, but surprisingly never truly boring. This surprised me because I never, ever, want to read something so sports-oriented. But, considering how much fighting takes place on the court, it is a perfect way for the author to show us how the relationships between the players evolve over the course of the books.
I only found out about this series because I follow a few YA fandoms with a focus on queer love stories on Pinterest and Ao3 and there is so, so much content about this series. I had never heard of it even though I read quite a bit and follow several YA lit and general fiction online resources. Where did this series come from? And why do the book covers look as if they were created in MS Paint by an eleventh grader?
I knew it was violent and that it centered around a specific fictional sport, however the obsession of the fandom piqued my interest. One of my favorite shows of all time is Riverdale (RIP) and, like the show, the drama and ridiculousness of this trilogy sucked me in and hung on. I’m a night owl by nature but I still stayed up far past my already late bedtime devouring these three books within the span of a week.
The best way I can think to sum up how hard these books go is to consider what you would have if you took the chaos of Riverdale (or any other CW show for that matter), applied a sort of Friday Night Lights sports obsession as its central focus, and then gave it to HBO to make it as depraved as possible.
Another thing is that, although I have only just become aware of this series in the past year, as it was self-published by the author over ten years ago, it has an enormous fan base in Russia. For example, if I search for fan fics in Ao3, for other popular YA fandoms, such as Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows (SoC) or Maggie Stiefvater’s The Raven Cycle (TRC), I get 9,541 works for Six of Crows and 9,856 for The Raven Cycle. This includes fics in all languages.
- All For the Game has 15,205 works in all languages (407 in Russian and 224 in Ukrainian).
- SoC: 9,541 (89 in Russian and 11 in Ukrainian) *
- TRC: 9,856 (99 in Russian and 3 in Ukrainian)
- The Hunger Games: 18,059 (130 in Russian and 16 in Ukrainian)
- Twilight: 17,575 (174 in Russian and 16 in Ukrainian)
*I’m not very confident in this number because it includes multiple books and the Netflix TV show.
I only researched using Ao3 as I am too lazy to search in Wattpad and Ao3 has a very good tagging system that allows for easy searching.
Next, I turned to Reddit (as one does) and dug around in the AFTG subreddit until I found the following information.
- “It’s one of the most popular book(s) in russian queer community, i think. AFTG has official translation on russian so we can buy it in any bookshop.”
- “Nora Sakavich herself wrote about the fact that Andrew and Neil are learning Russian in additional materials that can be found on AO3, Fikbook and, possibly, on her Twitter.”
I don’t really know what to make of this because there are quite a few queer YA stories that would translate well (literally and figuratively) across countries, but I have no idea why this particular one is so popular with Russian and Ukrainian speakers.
As I continue down my rabbit hole of AFTG research, I’ll add my updates to subsequent reviews. The author will release a fourth book in the next couple of years, which follows one of the other Exy players who escaped from The Ravens at the end of the third book.
Content warning for rape, assault (many types), torture, and child abuse.