Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Before beginning, I just want to apologize to anyone who reads this review. It won't really help you decide whether to read this book or not. Despite the fact that I've taken a fair amount of time to collect my thoughts and calm down, my head is still laden with what I've read and I'm unable to express my feelings in the way I'd normally have it. This review is somewhat vague and most of it probably won't mean anything unless you've read this book. So for that, I apologize.

Going in, I'm not sure what I was expecting from this book. Certainly not what I received. Leverage is a simultaneously devastating and uplifting mix of raw realism and gut-wrenching truth. This is a story about fear, abuse, and tragedy. But it is also a story about hope in the midst of the blackest situations, finding camaraderie in unlikely places, and winning back your life even after facing evil. The characters in this story are, at times, weak, scared, and torn. But ultimately they're strong, courageous, and, in the end, healed.

I've heard of the things that happen in this book on the news, I'm sure a lot of people have. But it is one thing to hear of something on the news and an entirely different thing to read about it; especially when it is being related by an author who doesn't go easy on the reader, doesn't sugarcoat reality. It astonishes me how something can be so revolting and yet also make me want to stand up and change. Change myself, change others, change something in this world to make it a better place for people to live in; and, most of all, to help prevent these atrocities from happening.
I wouldn't expect a debut author to be able to invoke such conflicting emotions in me, but the fact that Cohen was able to do just that only testifies that he was born to write. This book made me feel a red-hot rage. I found myself wishing that someone, anyone, would step outside of their own fear and self-preservation, their own painful past, their own mental anguish, and see someone else's before it was too late. And then somewhere around the halfway mark I began crying so hard that I could no longer see the pages. My library's copy now has little crinkled water marks from where my tears dropped on the pages. I felt like my gut had been punched by the fist on the cover. It knocked the air out of me.

I don't know. I don't know what else to say, what else can be said about a book like this. The only thing that I'm sure of at the moment is that this story needed to be told. These characters, somewhere in the world, at some point in time, their story is real. Despite the fact that this story tore me apart, or perhaps because it did, from now on, I'll read anything Cohen puts on paper.