Leah on the Offbeat by Becky Albertalli
Read from 4/24/18- 7/16/18
Goodreads Rating: 4.09 stars (****.9)
My Rating: 5 stars (*****)
“Imagine going about your day knowing someone’s carrying you in their mind. That has to be the best part of being in love- the feeling
of having a home in some else’s brain.”
Summary from Goodreads
Leah Burke—girl-band drummer, master of deadpan, and Simon Spier’s best friend from the award-winning Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda—takes center stage in this novel of first love and senior-year angst.
When it comes to drumming, Leah Burke is usually on beat—but real life isn’t always so rhythmic. An anomaly in her friend group, she’s the only child of a young, single mom, and her life is decidedly less privileged. She loves to draw but is too self-conscious to show it. And even though her mom knows she’s bisexual, she hasn’t mustered the courage to tell her friends—not even her openly gay BFF, Simon.
So Leah really doesn’t know what to do when her rock-solid friend group starts to fracture in unexpected ways. With prom and college on the horizon, tensions are running high. It’s hard for Leah to strike the right note while the people she loves are fighting—especially when she realizes she might love one of them more than she ever intended.
Link to the book on GoodReads:https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31180248-leah-on-the-offbeat?ac=1&from_search=true
“I hate when assholes have talent. I want to live in a world where good people rule at everything and shitty people suck at everything.”
Personal thoughts going in
Having read and adored Simon, I was so excited to read the sequel. I really enjoyed Leah as a character in the first book, and I was so excited to hear a new tale from her point of view.
“Mr. Spier, memorizing the Hamilton soundtrack is not going to save you on the AP Euro exam.”
I really loved the plot of this novel overall, sure, it was kind of given away by the back cover, but I loved seeing the way that it developed. I loved seeing the little nuances that Becky Albertalli does so well in her writing. The plot had a bit of Simon in it because the characters were the same way that they were in the original novel, but this was great because we saw them in a new and exciting way.
Another thing that I really loved about this book was the characters. They were back and better than ever, and I was so here for it. I thought that they might be different than they were in the first book, as people grow and change as stories and series go on, and while these characters did grow and change, they also were the same way they were in the first book, and I loved that.
The last thing that I loved about this book was the details that were put into the novel. This is something that I think that Becky Albertalli does very well. For me, a good book is knowing that the characters are doing these actions, or that they will do these actions. A great book is getting down to the reason why the characters are doing, or are going to do the things that they will do. Getting into their mind, and do they know what could happen if it goes the wrong way is important, and I think that this book is filled with the why the characters do the actions they do.
“There’s this tug in my chest. Because when Bram says Simon’s name, he pronounces every part of it. Like it’s worth being careful over.”
The one thing that I didn’t like about this book was how long it took you to find out the girl it was Leah was in love with. I spent the book thinking that it was someone else, and this might have been the point, to just keep you guessing until it was revealed, but honestly, I wish that there was more time to see Leah and her girlfriend together. I understand there could be a third book, and I think that the ending was the perfect segway into a third book.
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