Slam Pdf Summary
Things had been ticking along quite nicely. My teachers suddenly started talking to me about going to college, my mum had ditched her rubbish boyfriend, and I had a gorgeous new girlfriend. You know that bit in a film when they show couples laughing and holding hands and kissing in lots of different places while a song plays? Alicia and I were like that, except we didn’t go to lots of different places. We went to about three, including Alicia’s bedroom. Anyway, it took years for everything to come together like that, and it took two seconds to screw it all up. One mistake and my life would never be the same.
When the wheels come off the trucks and your life slams into a wall… who do you turn to then? I turn to Tony Hawk. You maybe would not expect the world’s best skater to know everything you need to know about hour life, but he does. And if you don’t understand what he’s saying, then he’ll just whizz you into the future.
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Slam Book Review
4.0 out of 5 stars Women – This is your guide to how men think
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 10, 2008
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I was trying to think of how to review this book and I thought of two ways. One is the simple, plot based review:
Some dude gets his girlfriend pregnant and he learns life is like skating, one slip-up and your whole life can change for the worse.
The problem with Hornby is that Hornby doesn’t write for the plot. Sure, he usually has clever plot hooks, a single guy goes to single parent support group meetings to hit on women with a higher chance of being loose anywhere except a brothel but ends up unexpectedly bonding with a woman’s kid, but the plot isn’t what makes Hornby worth reading. Hornby is worth reading due to his execution – his ability to craft everymen male leads and tell their tales with a lot of wit. In Slam, the wit is missing but the male character is much stronger, much more relatable.
I honestly feel like Sam, the male lead, is a character every guy can look at and say, “Yeah, that’s pretty much the stuff I think and feel.” I feel like this is a book women should read so they can get an inside look at how men actually think and feel and why we do or say the stuff we do.
This is the first book Hornby has written where I felt like the characters were living, breathing people. I think Slam has his best developed female characters. Looking back on his earlier work, that isn’t saying much, but this time he really nailed the women.
The other thing about this book is Hornby is finally getting a grasp on how to end his books. With About a Boy and High Fidelity, it was clear he had no idea how to end so he had everything work out phenomenally well like a bad sitcom. In A Long Way Down, Hornby was finally moving away from the sitcom ending to the open-ended ending, but he still was grasping for a resolution. With Slam, Hornby has finally let a book end with confidence. The Q&A at the end was a cute way of saying, “I’m out of stuff to say. For further adventures of the future of Roof, write your own!”
Overall, an excellent book I’ll be recommending to every woman I know!
3.0 out of 5 stars Adult Female Reader Takes Issue
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 11, 2007
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Hungry for a Nick Hornby fix, I imagined that Slam might indeed work for adult readers as young adult literature often does: either by reminding us of our adolescence, never as far away as we might wish; or by providing a particular interesting example of a genre. Slam does, and is, neither. Its virtues first: (1) Nick Hornby wrote it, (2) something is occasionally funny (notably Sam’s xenophobic father), and (3) it manages to be a cautionary tale without distracting didacticism.
Here are some of its weaknesses: It really makes no effort to think about any option to pregnancy other than having the baby. Sam’s girlfriend simply wants to have the baby, end of story. Precisely why that is so we
never know. Moreover, she not only wants the baby, she more than once declares that she’s never wanted anything more. Why is that? Granted, life is sometimes like this. But surely it’s troubling that in this book, it’s the male who rebels, who minds the limitations on his freedom, who worries about his future. And yes, I know that Sam, a male, is the narrator. But that fact doesn’t really change the question all that much. Equally disburbing: why does Sam’s mother get pregnant? What on earth is the point of that? We aren’t even encouraged to think that baby Emily’s father is necessarily a serious relationship. I can’t find either motive within the novel, or sense in the world outside of the novel, for this choice.
Pregnancy politics aside, Slam is just not very interesting. Sam talks entirely too much and is frequently coy. The book is particularly painful when Sam is at his most immature. I skipped a dizzying amount, something I never do with Hornby’s books. In the end, I felt I had spent a great deal of time with someone I never really came to like. Why can’t we know something else about Sam? What kind of art does he do? Could we know the name of a single course he’s taking or project he’s working on?
I understand that the pregnancy, for Sam, consumes him and causes him to chatter about it non-stop, to himself and to us. But the degree of self-absorption, the relentless indifference to almost anything else, is hard to read or to want to read.
Some reviews have said that Sam gives voice to adolescent males in difficult circumstances. Fair enough. Maybe he does. The point is, I wouldn’t know and neither, I dare say, would many of the reviewers. If indeed Slam captures a particular emotional lexicon, then good for it. But for me, it did not manage to create, even for a long moment, a language for the rest of us.
About Nick Hornby Author Of Slam pdf Book
Nick Hornby is the author of the novels Slam pdf Book, A Long Way Down, How to Be Good, High Fidelity, and About a Boy, and the memoir Fever Pitch. He is also the author of Songbook, a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, Shakespeare Wrote for Money, and The Polysyllabic Spree, as well as the editor of the short-story collection Speaking with the Angel. He is a recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ E. M. Forster Award and the winner of the 2003 Orange Word International Writers’ London Award. Among his many other honors and awards, four of his titles have been named New York Times Notable Books. A film written by Hornby, An Education – shown at the Sundance Film Festival to great acclaim – was the lead movie at the 2009 Toronto Film Festival and distributed by Sony that fall. That same September, the author published his latest novel, Juliet, Naked to wide acclaim. Hornby lives in North London.
Slam pdf, Paperback, Hardcover Book Information
- Publisher : G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers; First Edition (October 16, 2007)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 320 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0399250484
- ISBN-13 : 978-0399250484
- Reading age : 12 – 15 years
- Lexile measure : 740L
- Grade level : 7 – 9
- Item Weight : 14.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 1.25 x 8.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #3,454,220 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #291 in Teen & Young Adult Fiction on Pregnancy Social & Family Issues (Books)
- #2,860 in Teen & Young Adult Humorous Fiction
- #133,318 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews: 4.3 out of 5 stars 496 ratings
Get A Copy Of Slam pdf Or Paperback By Nick Hornby
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