This whole finishing a book a week thing for my young adult literature class is actually kind of satisfying. I get to read books that I’ve wanted to read for a while, with the added plus of doing homework! Being an English major is an absolutely wonderful thing. 🙂
So I just finished Leverage by Joshua Cohen. Leverage follows the story of Danny and Kurt, who are both high school athletes at Oregrove High School. Danny may be a rising gymnastics star, but to the rest of the school, he is just the runt that gets picked on. He, and his other teammates, are the constant target of the school’s football stars. The two teams engage in a prank war that escalates and escalates until something horrific happens to one of Danny’s teammates. However, Kurt, one of the new recruits for the football team, comes to their rescue and becomes an unlikely ally. Told from the alternating points of view of Danny and Kurt, Leverage paints a realistic and difficult to digest picture of high school sports, one that isn’t often talked about.
Usually, I don’t read sports novels, and this one took me a little bit to get into. It was a little slow moving at the beginning, in my opinion, and I wasn’t really sure where the novel as a whole was headed. However, once I got to the middle of the book, I started getting into it, because I had learned more about the characters and cared more about them. Plus, the middle of the book is really where the action started to pick up. The main thing I didn’t like about the novel was the way the author kept referring to Kurt’s horrible background, and took forever to actually come out and say what happened. While sometimes this works in novels, I think this aspect could have been handled in a better way. As a whole, the novel was generally a pretty fast paced read, once things started to really happen. Once things start to happen, everything keeps escalating, keeping readers right on the edge of their seat. If you’re a fan of sports novels, Leverage is definitely worth a look.
Next up for me for my class is The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily Danforth. It shall be an interesting adventure! Until next time, happy reading! 🙂