How Kelly presents Leah, and how the character develops across the text: the talkative girlfriend who fills Phil's silences with monologues about bonobos, history and happiness, acts as the group's conscience, protests at Adam's killing and finally leaves, silent for once.
The key quotations for this character and how to analyse them, with the context that shapes them.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'brutal terror', 'What have we done', 'we did it together', 'Floods of tears', 'If I killed myself right here in front of you', 'This is insane', 'you can change the world', 'man in prison', 'a lot, lot bigger', 'I am part of history', 'I admire you so much', 'you're not human'.
Leah's monologues: a stream of talk about bonobos and chimps, happiness and history to a boyfriend who will not answer, mixing humour, cleverness and panic, and her attempts to shock him, from strangling herself to showing him the pet she has killed.
OCR's 2024 comparison extract, in which Leah, about to run away, ends up admiring Phil for never questioning life, and the reversal at the end of Three, when she spits out his sweet and leaves without a word.
Different readings: the group's conscience and its most likeable member, or someone complicit who stays loyal to Phil and only leaves when it is too late.
Quotations are short phrases of a few words, the way you would learn them for a closed-book exam.
OCR's question on this text has two parts on the same text. Part (a), 20 marks, compares a printed extract from it with an unseen extract of the same genre, and weights your response (AO1) and context (AO3) twice as heavily as language analysis (AO2), where context means the social and cultural situations you can infer from the two extracts and their introductions; an answer on only one of the two extracts cannot go above Level 3. Part (b), 20 marks, explores another moment in the same text from memory, with response and analysis of language, form and structure (AO1 and AO2) equally weighted and no marks for context. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the part it is for.
