Book 3.2: Slam

Author: Nick Hornby
Dates read: July 17, 2011 - July 20, 2011 (4 days)
Pages: 309
Genre: Fiction, young adult

A quick read that nearly put me back on track after a long one, I picked this novel up because Nick Hornby is one of my favorite writers and oddly I hadn’t yet read it. Actually, it’s not that odd I hadn’t read it as it’s a young adult novel and I suppose that made me keep passing it over for his other work. I have since come to the conclusion that I should’ve read it a long time ago.

The novel follows Sam, a fifteen year old boy who loves skateboarding and idolizes Tony Hawk. When his ex-girlfriend tells him she’s pregnant, he’s very scared because he’s always known that having him when she was sixteen drastically affected his own mom’s life. Sam turns to the poster of Tony Hawk that he often talks out his problems at, but instead of mentally hearing whatever advice he thinks Tony Hawk would give him, Sam finds himself periodically whizzed into the future for glimpses of the way things could end up if he doesn’t *ahem* get his shit together in the present.

This book is very entertaining, and one of few things I’ve read that gets into the voice of a teenager in a way that’s both realistic and engaging. There’s not a lot of fuss to the time travel portions (Sam himself acknowledges that it sounds crazy but from his perspective it’s what happened, so he just goes with it), which let me not think about the mechanics and just focus on how the trips affected Sam’s growth as a character. Hearing everything about a teenage pregnancy from the point of view of the father was surprisingly charming, and Hornby does a great job creating Sam as a likeable albeit screw-up character who may not always do the right thing yet generally has his heart in the right place. It actually was quite a page-turner when it comes down to it, because I was very keen to know what Sam would do when armed with information on how his future may turn out, especially since there’s never a sense of there being a right or wrong answer/decision/path to take. This book really boils down to a great narrative way to heighten the extrapolating anyone does when trying to figure out how to get from the present they’re in to the future they want, plus how to deal with the inevitable detours along the way without losing hope. And if that made it sound cheesy, trust me, it’s anything but, because it definitely has a vein of dark humor running through it the way Hornby’s adult novels do. I can see how teenagers would enjoy this novel, but I’d recommend it to anyone that likes Hornby’s other books.