The Sunshine Court and the Golden Raven Book Review
The Sunshine Court & The Golden Raven Book Review by Nora Sakavic
Okay, let me set the scene: I’m minding my business, scrolling through Goodreads, when suddenly I see not one, but TWO Nora Sakavic books staring back at me like I haven’t been a devoted Foxhole Court disciple for years.
I lost my shit.
How did I not know these books were out? Who failed me? Where was the press tour? The skywriting? The emergency email alert system specifically for when Nora Sakavic releases anything at all??
Because All for the Game is one of my favorite series of all time. Period. No notes. Those books live rent-free in my brain and heart and probably my bones. So naturally, my expectations for The Sunshine Court and The Golden Raven were sky high. Possibly too high.
And honestly? They were…pretty good.
This new series focuses on one Jeremey Knox and the devastatingly tragic Jean Moreau and their ember-like romance (classic Nora making you think there’s nothing between them for 600 pages and then delivering in the last 30 pages of book 3…I’m assuming).
The whole story follows both the POV of Jeremy and Jean after Jean transfers to the USC Trojans and the fallout of leaving the Ravens’ nest.
To give you an idea of the glacier-like pace, the first book, The Sunshine Court, is simply the summer before school even starts. So 300 hundred something pages for a few months. Crazy. And yet, somehow, some way, it’s still great.
Book two, The Golden Raven, delves a little more into the actual sport of exy (lol), but we barely get a dent into the school year with how much mental trauma Jean is harboring.
Classic Nora is back with that beautiful, blood-soaked prose where the plot moves slower than a snail but you’re so emotionally invested that you barely care.
You don’t read Nora Sakavic for neat plot arcs and action scenes every chapter—you read her for simmering tension, devastating one-liners, and characters so broken you need a tetanus shot just thinking about them.
And oh, the Ravens? Even more messed up than I remembered. I thought I’d seen the worst in the original trilogy, but no. Nora looked at her own chaos and said “What if… worse?” And then she did it.
That being said… something was missing.
The pacing felt slow—even for Nora. I found myself wishing things would just move already, or that we’d get a sharper character beat to anchor me to the moment.
I kept confusing people, which is not something I ever did with the Foxes. Back then, I could tell you everyone's trauma and favorite junk food. Here? I mixed up Cat and Laila multiple times and they're the main characters.
There are too many Trojans for me to care about them all.
I still devoured both books because duh, it’s Nora Sakavic, and I’d read her grocery list if she published it. But I couldn't shake the feeling that something was off—the spark, the edge, the je ne sais quoi that made All for the Game All for the Game just wasn’t totally there.
I still think it’s amazing that fan shipping of Jean and Jeremey was so prolific and profound that Nora wrote it and published it and made it canon, delivering these books to us on a silver platter.
Maybe you will disagree with me on this book review. Maybe you think these books are better than the originals, but there’s just something I can’t quite put my finger on.
Maybe it’s because the first book, while focusing on Andrew and Neil, was really about found family at its core and these books aren’t.
Recommendation: If you're a Foxes fan, obviously you're reading this no matter what I say. And you should. It’s dark, it’s sharp, it’s classic Nora. But go in with tempered expectations and prepare to sit with the story instead of sprint through it.
Score: 7/10
