peteg's blog - noise - books - 2017 06 13 JoshuaCohen Leverage

Joshua C. Cohen: Leverage.

Tue, Jun 13, 2017./noise/books | Link

Kindle. I picked this up thinking it was by Joshua Cohen; the bloke with the middle initial C writes young adult fiction, so this was a surprise. Briefly: football jocks are the establishment and wildly abuse their power, culminating in some sexual deviancy and other extreme behaviour. It's all violent, law of the jungle stuff, and the weedy gymnasts get creamed until they don't. Unfortunately things get squared by tediously normativity, the power of strong women to civilize any man, I-blame-the-parents, an adult's take on justice that I don't remember encountering in my youth; really I wanted the ex-special ops teacher to unload some manners on one of the jocks, or maybe for one of the subculture geeks to go postal (in a non-violent way). Presumably this kind of thing cannot happen every generation, or in every school, for otherwise they would be proscribed organizations. Well written for what it is, but what is it?