This is your evening. Your game. Your moment. Seize it with everything you have. Do your very best and risk everything. Fight because you don’t now how to die quietly. Win because you don’t know how to lose.

What do you get when you mix a gritty organized crime backstory with the usual underdog sports story? A masterpiece, that’s what. Seriously, it shouldn’t work, but Neil Josten is a spectacular narrator and absolutely makes me believe that a guy who is actively being hunted by a serial killer would still make a sport his top priority.

Unpopular opinion, but you can pry the 5 star quality rating from my cold dead hands. I don’t care if you won’t take my opinion on literature seriously after this, but I genuinely don’t agree this is badly written. Badly researched? Yes, absolutely, this is not how the real world works, especially anything to do with drugs, but I have never un-suspended my disbelief since the day I was born, so that takes nothing away from the story for me. Otherwise, the worst of its crimes (from a technical standpoint) is a clunky exposition at the beginning of the second book. The plot is wack and only works when you’re into underdog sports stories, found family, and mafia books, but if it works it works.

The strong point of this trilogy are the characters and their dynamics with each other. They’re all insane. Most of them do horrible things. Both of those things deeply affect their dynamics with each other, and manage to make them into something addictively unique. There’s one of the most beautiful love stories I ever read in here, and it only works because it is so very non-traditional. There are siblings who’d kill for each other but are incapable of having a conversation. “Old friends” who make me cry just thinking about them. The single most toxic pair of codependent siblings to ever walk the earth. Friendships that take a while to form and grow and still probably look weird to an outsider, parents who choose to adopt every wayward child that comes their way. The found family in these books is a love letter to everyone who ever thought they were incapable of having normal relationships with people, for whatever reason—you can build your own family, to your own rules.

All For The Game is a story about perseverance and finding a home, but most importantly, it’s a story about Exy, because remember: no matter who wants to kill you or when your exams are, that random sport you’re obsessed with should always be your top priority.

WHEW! I totally flew through this series! It was sooo addictive. There is always something happening to these poor kids. They cannot catch a fucking break 🥲

This is such a weird book in that you have this sports tournament that is like massively important to the players and that is their end-goal, but then there’s also this super intense mafia plot that is so much higher stakes lol. It kinda means that we get two climaxes - one kind of in the middle for the ~ you know ~ background minor inconvenience of being a target for a serial killer and giant criminal empire and then the far more important climax of winning a school lacross sports tournament 💀🤡 It’s soo funny.

What is cool is that after we get the serious stuff kind of out of the way we can really focus on the characters and get an idea of how they’ll do in the future which I loved. Like idc give me 15 endings, I NEED to know my blorbos will be happy!

The actual ‘end’ to the mafia thing was honestly a little wishy washy. Idc it actually seemed kind of easy in the end lol. But honestly… At that point I was just relieved that those boys finally caught a break.

All the characters are so great. They really are the epitome of a found family. I love how protective everyone is of Neil 🥹

And of course, I love, love, looove Andrew and Nei separately AND together. They fit together so well. They have such a giant boatload of issues that you would think any relationship would be massively toxic or impossible in the long run…but they are truly the poster children for ‘consent is sexy’. The way they ALWAYS respect each other's boundaries is truly special. Really the only sad thing is that so much shit was constantly going on that we only really got to see them ‘together’ in the last part - and it was still so new in that bit. I just want to know how their relationship or whatever it is progresses. Like Neil definitely has Exy as a goal and we know he’ll keep going but Andrew definitely still has a long way to go… I mean they both do obviously, but I feel like Neil is mentally so resilient and is actively working on leaning on his teammates and gasp friends, while Andrew is still pretty closed off, isolated and depressed.Uuuugh I just need him to be okay

Anyway, thanks to everyone who recommended this series, it was definitely a wild ride but 100% worth it and this will definitely be a series I will reread often!