Review: Leah on the Offbeat

Leah on the Offbeat by Becky Albertalli
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"As for the fact that Malfoy, Crabbe, and Goyle appeared to be going their different ways when they were usually inseparable, these things happened as people got older - Ron and Hermione, Harry reflected sadly, were living proof."
-Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

That quote really came to mind to me after I read this latest Becky Albertalli book, a more direct follow-up to Simon Vs. than The Upside of Unrequited was. It's recognizably Becky's style, following one teenage protagonist struggling to come to terms with their identity (in Leah's case, bisexual - she's also fat, but that's something she's much better at making her own) and find some much-deserved love. Along the way, there's a lot of laughs - most of which are Simon's and Bram's faults, of course. Leah, though? Her sense of humor isn't really geared towards making me laugh. She rubs me the wrong way almost from the start, when she's ragging on Journey (was it really called for to compare their music to meth?), and she also has an alarming tendency to rub everyone the wrong way in-universe too. Open mouth, insert foot, chew thoroughly - and because she's Leah, she doubles down on the snark each time she does so, especially to someone she loves. Like her mom. Or the girl she's fallen in love with, who's also struggling to figure out her own sexuality - hell, there's a scene where Leah, while still closeted herself, tells this girl not to waffle on her labels and totally polices her sexual identity in the process. As a bi reader, that actually kinda pissed me off more than a bit, and I know I'm not the only one.

And in between all of Leah's rudeness, nearly everyone in her friend circle is struggling to come to terms with the end of high school and the forthcoming start of college, leading to a lot of drama that plays out like a Super 8-grade train wreck. I still actually kinda wish that Becky could've written a sequel from the POV of Abby or Bram - though we know she wouldn't do so because they're outside her lane racially, but if anyone could pull it off, we all know Becky could.

But hey, Leah and everyone else around her is only human, and they're all flawed as hell. Some more so than others, of course, which is why there's so much train wreckage going on. It makes this book less enjoyable than either of its Simonverse predecessors, but again, it's meant to show that we can't all be as fluffy and adorable as Simon Spider (I still can't stop calling him that, lol) all the time. This book represents all our anger and resentment just as Simon Vs. represents our sweetness and passions, and Upside represents our loneliness and insecurities. And again, Leah's not the only one contributing to the nasty game around here. Look no further than the one person who makes the huge mistake of claiming she didn't get into a certain college because she's white and Abby, who did, is black. (Cue Leah going all the way off in Abby's defense.) I know for certain of at least one black classmate in high school who got this same treatment from people he used to call friends - I didn't know it at the time, but I once found him talk about it in a Dartmouth student paper editorial after a random Google search. And, in hindsight, I'm really not surprised at these old classmates of ours at all.

Like both of Becky's books so far, I'm thinking this one's kind of a 3.5, but this one I'll round down to a 3. It's hard to read a lot of the time because after a while, Leah's whole "I'm a Slytherin, so that means I'm an asshole by nature" shtick really wears thin. But just like the Dracos in the fanfics she loves to read, she does have a soft center somewhere, and that does ultimately come out and win in the end. Even if that end is a little too neatly-tied-up-with-a-bow, but then it wouldn't be Becky if it wasn't.

Now I can super look forward to Becky's collaboration with Adam Silvera on What If It's Us. And seethe that unless my schedule changes, I won't be able to meet them on their Bay Area tour stop, not when it's on a night I currently work late enough to miss the event.

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