Leverage

Overview

Joshua Cohen's Leverage follows Danny, a sophomore whose talent on the gymnastics team makes him a target rather than a source of pride at his high school. He and his teammates are routinely demeaned by members of the football program, who treat the smaller, less-muscled gymnasts as fair game for humiliation both in the locker room and out of it.

The dynamic shifts with the arrival of a new player on the football team, a young man whose body and history both bear the marks of past trauma. Rather than joining in the abuse directed at Danny, he begins to step outside the role his teammates expect of him, and an improbable bond forms between the two boys across the divide that separates their teams.

What begins as a story about two very different athletes gradually opens into something broader about loyalty, complicity, and what it costs to break from a group that rewards cruelty.

A Story About Silence and Complicity

Cohen sets much of the novel's tension not in dramatic confrontations but in the smaller, cumulative moments where someone could speak up and doesn't. The football team's hierarchy depends on everyone playing along, and the book is as interested in the bystanders and quiet enablers as it is in the boys doing direct harm. Danny's friendship with his unlikely new ally becomes a test case for whether an individual can resist a culture built around dominance without being destroyed by it.

The novel also sits within a body of young-adult fiction that uses school athletics as a lens for examining masculinity, hierarchy, and the pressure to conform. By placing a gymnast, a sport often coded as less "masculine" in a high school's social order, opposite a football player carrying his own hidden damage, Cohen complicates easy assumptions about who holds power and who is vulnerable. The result is a book frequently discussed in conversations about bullying-prevention curricula and literature aimed at reaching teen boys in particular.

Why Leverage Has Been Challenged

Sexual violence is at the center of most objections to this novel. The story does not shy away from depicting an assault among the student athletes, and some parents and administrators have argued that the scene's explicitness makes it inappropriate for the younger end of the young-adult readership, regardless of the narrative purpose it serves. Related concerns about graphic bullying and physical brutality among the teammates have also been raised, with critics contending that the violence is rendered in more visceral detail than necessary to convey its emotional weight.

A smaller number of challenges have cited the book's frank language and locker-room dialogue as unsuitable for school shelves. Those defending the novel's inclusion in libraries and classrooms counter that its unflinching treatment of assault and abuse of power is precisely what gives the book value as a tool for discussing consent, bystander responsibility, and the hidden costs of toxic team culture. Records in this catalog show the book has drawn formal challenges in 2 states and 3 districts.