Thank you Nora for adding Exy terms and rules in the back. Just another reason for passionate fans to create teams😆 If you’re looking for a defensive player, I might be able to play for like 5 or 10 minutes. Or just be on the sidelines, please, and be moral support. I have a very loud voice and would love to shout at the other team.

I think in the first book we don’t get much of Andrew’s personality because we’re getting so much of Neil (and also Andrew is trying to act like he’s all cool) but this is the book where we get to know him more, and what he is… is a massive dork and I love him for that.

He also shows more of his personality as we read on and his sense of humour – which I absolutely love. It’s my type of humour – both that I love to see in characters and also that it fits my sense of humour. I’d love it if we were friends so we could just be super snarky all the time. But I don’t think he’d want to be friends with me…

And with showing more of his personality, you also get how absolutely amazing and what a natural talent he is at Exy. I love that. I love how Neil encourages him to be more passionate about it – true, that’s mostly because Neil is an Exy fiend and wants to talk about Exy 100% of the time – and although Andrew doesn’t really become passionate about the sport, he puts enough effort into it. And I think that he does truly like the game and maybe in the future when he’s had a lot of therapy and time to work out his feelings, he’ll be able to say it fully.

The amount of sass that Neil shows throughout the series proves that he’s the perfect partner for Andrew. And also the fact that Andrew likes it when Neil goes off on someone just makes it even better because it proves that Andrew listens to Neil and focuses on what he does.

There’s just so many good quotes and a lot of them I love to look at are just further examples of Neil’s mastery of sass and also the fact that, much like me, he sometimes does not have a filter. Which probably makes me love him more.

The found family aspect starts build itself more and more in this book and there’s sweet moments between different characters, there’s heartfelt moments, and there’s definitely tense moments, because this series loves to be tense.

This is a series I will always hold up as a great example as a found family (trope) series. But I will also add that it’s dark and that’s ok because books are allowed to be dark. And the found family aspect in this book is very messy. And that’s totally fine because what type of perfect family dynamic do you know of and what is it like to live that life?