Leverage

by Joshua C. Cohen

Overview

A timely book about bullies, their victims, and a high school football team where winning is the only thing that matters

This intense sports novel will strike a chord with those who followed the tragic football stories that broke in 2011. In this heart-pounding debut, Joshua C. Cohen conveys the pressures and politics of being a high school athlete in a way that is both insightful and compelling. At Oregrove High, there's an extraordinary price for victory, paid both on and off the football field, and it claims its victims without mercy. When the unthinkable happens, an unlikely friendship is at the heart of an increasingly violent, steroid-infused power struggle. This is a book that will stay with readers long after they turn the last page.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780142420867
Publisher:	Penguin Young Readers Group
Publication date:	09/27/2012
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)
Lexile:	870L (what's this?)
Age Range:	14 Years

About the Author

Joshua C. Cohen is a former collegiate gymnast who now lives with his wife in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

Sports novels don't hit much harder than this. Sophomore Danny may be a rising star on the gymnastics team, but that figures little in his daily life, where his small size makes him a target for the school's ruling class—the hormone-pumped, college-scouted stars of the football team. A minor grudge escalates until horrific revenge is taken upon one of Danny's teammates. Coming to the rescue, however, is Kurt, a behemoth new fullback whose scarred face and stuttering speech hint at a past that puts him at odds with his teammates. Told from the well-drawn alternating perspectives of Danny and Kurt, this is not a book about steroids; they exist, and they exacerbate the strife, but even Kurt admits that they have some short term benefits. Rather, this is a novel about being trapped inside a web of expectations, where one's family, community, team, and future rest on the assumed perpetuation of the established social order. Sports fans will love Cohen's style: direct, goal oriented, and filled with sensory detail. Characters and subplots are overly abundant yet add a deepness rarely found in comparable books. Drugs, rape, language, and violence make this book serious business, but those with experience will tell you that sports is serious business, too."— Daniel Kraus

Booklist Starred Review

Kurt and Danny are on high-school teams vastly different in school status. Danny, slightly built, is on the underfunded gymnastics team, while physically gifted Kurt is the latest addition to the popular football team. Each uses sports to cope with tough personal issues. Kurt's foster care and painful stutter are more visible than Danny's insecurities. A bullying episode inflicted by some football players drives a young man to suicide and links Danny and Kurt in an uneasy secret. This frank portrayal of the darker side of high-stakes school athletics is told in two very distinctive voices. There is little subtlety in the storytelling—the football coach is predictably single-minded, while the gymnastic coach is sensitive and earnest—but the exploitation of young athletes, from accepted steroid use to the way school budgets are manipulated, comes across. The gamesequences are well done, and there is plenty of authentic locker-room talk, some of it racist and homophobic. Kurt and hisstruggles are heartbreakingly real,and readers willpull for him long after the story ends. (Fiction. 14 & up)

Kirkus Reviews