e Upside of Unrequited<\/a>,<\/em> but Molly Suso had at least the good grace to internalise her issues instead of externalising them to everyone around them. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re expected to believe that Leah likes some people and calls them \u00e2\u20ac\u0153cinnamon rolls\u00e2\u20ac\u009d – at this point a truly dusty Tumblrism – but this is just reflexivity on Albertalli\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s part. Leah calls herself an \u00e2\u20ac\u0153asshole\u00e2\u20ac\u009d all the time, but she doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t do anything to change this fact. This is a character entirely opposed to growing and changing, who is constantly in the throes of self-pity. It gets old, fast.<\/p>\nLeah gives no one reason to enjoy her company, and yet the other characters are drawn to her. It may be inertia for those who have been caught in her orbit for years, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s inexplicable in a newer transplant like Abby. Leah pays basic lip service to her mother, but is needlessly cruel to and about her mother\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s boyfriend, whose only crime appears to be dating Leah\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s mother. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not given any reason in the body of the text to like or dislike anyone except on Leah\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s say so, even though it is clear that her judgement is completely lacking.<\/p>\n
This carries on across the ensemble of characters \u00e2\u20ac\u201c especially the ones that no one remembers from Simon vs. the Homo-Sapiens Agenda<\/em>, Morgan and Anna. With Morgan and Anna, Leah has a domineering self-righteousness that endears her to no one. Worse than this is a tirade that she goes on against Abby about the taxonomy of sexuality, as if Leah herself was an expert. Apart from there being a sliding scale going back at least as far as Kinsey, nobody needs this seventeen year old girl\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s lectures.<\/p>\nIf Simon has had his story told, Albertalli mercifully sees little reason to advance it further. He falls into the background, and provides the novel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s one grace note: a pop culture reference that isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t Harry Potter<\/em>. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an entire plot thread about Abby reading Harry Potter<\/em> for the first time and being told \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t just like Harry Potter<\/em>. You have to be balls-out obsessed with it.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d That Simon gets to be a Love, Actually<\/em> fan means that there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s at least one more thing in the world for these characters, and that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the only relief we get. If you read enough (too much?) Young Adult fiction, it becomes incredibly clear that only one franchise has ever been consumed by its characters. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the Ernest Cline dilemma inverted.<\/p>\nThe rest of the returning ensemble isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t as lucky as Simon. If you liked the character of Nick in the first one, prepare for him to be ground under Albertalli\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s boot as a drunken buffoon (the literal version of that would please a different sort of fan). If you wanted Abby to be a wishy washy person incapable of expressing herself \u00e2\u20ac\u201c something like a mirror of Leah \u00e2\u20ac\u201c you get exactly that.<\/p>\n
What little story there is is driven by Leah\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s inactivity \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and it says a lot that the paralysis of a teen\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s self-doubt becomes irritating rather than being a source of sympathy \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and it all culminates in a conclusion that the characters themselves acknowledge is a bad idea. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s okay, though: Albertalli can write another book \u00e2\u20ac\u201c maybe this time about Martin, who is somehow completely invulnerable to consequences \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and show that everything she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s set up here can be undone too.<\/p>\n
Leah on the Offbeat<\/em> was written as fan service, but the thing about fans is that while some of them are rabid, others are discerning critics who are more likely to find issue with the flaws in the things that they want to love. Like Leah Burke herself, Leah on the Offbeat<\/em> is a thoroughly unlovable novel.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Simon vs. the Homo-Sapiens Agenda, the only thing worse than the title was the character of Leah. Leah got angry at Simon for no reason on more than one occasion, and her motivations were entirely shadowy from start to finish. She was the least defined of the entire Simon crew and the least worthy of the reader\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s attention. Leah existed to make Simon feel bad, and he had enough to feel bad about in the first place. A book is the crystallisation of a moment in time. To add anything to that runs the risk of disturbing the balance <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1536,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","has_thumb"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/keep\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/leah-feature.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1HLZ6-oI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1532"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1532\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1545,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1532\/revisions\/1545"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/batrock.net\/keep\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/Leah-on-the-Offbeat-198x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\n