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| Slam | 
 enlarge | Author: Nick Hornby
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
Buy Used: £1.10
You Save: £6.89 (86%)
New (29) from £1.65
Avg. Customer Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 1573
Media: Paperback
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5 x 0.9
ISBN: 0141321407
EAN: 9780141321400
ASIN: 0141321407
Publication Date: April 3, 2008
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: Worn/used- good second hand reading copy. Fast dispatch from experienced British seller.
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 6-10 of 10 | | « PREV | | |
 So disappointing May 2, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
Really poor book. I feel cheated of spending money on it. Poorly written with nothing to say. Sam was unappealing and i couldn't care less what happened..he didn't seem to care about anything or anyone and seemed incapable of speaking! Conversations were stilted and story was just poor. The stupid bits where he flashed forward in life were ridiculous too. I was really disappointed and had been a big fan previously. I only hope Hornby can move on and up.
Terrrible, really.... April 26, 2008
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
The story was flat, the usually brilliant Hornby pop culture references are not there. Reference Tony Hawks,reference the name of a few skate board tricks. The only trick Hornby bothered to describe was a 580 and it really does not take a genius to work that out. Its sloppy. The usual line is I was practicing x trick and then move on to something else. If you are expecting a book with lots of skateboarding metaphores you are going to be very dissapointed.
So on to how modern teenagers are portrayed. Well - they seem to have sex in their bedrooms while their parents are in the house a lot..... yeh right of course they do. The teen girls want to have a baby yeh right..... Thats just about all Hornby bothers to tell us about their culture.
The lazy reaserch is continued into the plot... the hero is whisked into the future during his dreams (for real). It makes no difference to his actions in the present and seems only to be there to add a little 'spice' to the story. not neccesary.
This book just seems rushed, flat and uninteresting. I can't find any humor or any incentive to read this again.
 Teenage Kicks April 22, 2008
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
I wasn't particularly looking forward to reading Nick Hornby's `Slam', his first teenage novel. It was nineteen years since I was last a teenager and even then I think I was probably too old for the term to really stick. However this was a novel by Nick Hornby whose `High Fidelity' is my favourite novel; whose `Fever Pitch' is my favourite memoir; I think you get the idea, I like Nick Hornby, I don't however like teenagers. Anyway there was nothing for it, I had to roll up my sleeves, grit my teeth, grasp the nettle and take the book by the spine.
I'm so glad I did, what a fantastic and painfully funny book. Certainly Hornby's best since `About a Boy' with which it sets a fairly consistent tone. This is quite remarkable as `Slam' is written in the first person as a teenage boy. Although `About a Boy' was very insightful into the mind of an adolescent boy and his relationship with the adults around him it didn't have to do it in the boy's voice. `Slam' is written in a very convincing voice of a fifteen year old boy, although the language and passions for music and skating very much tie the novel to the present the spirit in which it is written ties it to teenagers of any generation and consequently I can feel a certain empathy for a teenager I could obviously have fathered.
I don't want to tell you anything of the plot as it would spoil the book to hear about it in my voice rather than `Sam's', trust me it's better than the blurb which relies too heavily on the Tony Hawks fandom to give a balanced appreciation of the book.
I think that the reason that Sam's voice in `Slam' works is that it still resonates with the same passion as Rob's did in `High Fidelity'. Perhaps the reason Hornby and even I can understand this character so well is that we belong to the first generation that never grew up, we are still essentially teenagers. The four hundred or so middle aged men jumping up and down to `Teenage Kicks' at a recent Undertones concert I attended possibly suffer from the same malaise.
 Very good April 22, 2008
2 out of 6 found this review helpful
I actually think this is the best book by Hornby since About a Boy.
Hornby had a great book with "About a boy" (please forget the movie and only watch it to waste some time AFTER having read the book). That was the first one I read by him. Then I read High Fidelity, which I thought was good, though not that good. How to be good and A long way down were ok, though I thought Hornby was getting a bit worse every time. Slam is a good comeback in my eyes.
Getting slammed April 1, 2008
11 out of 15 found this review helpful
Nick Hornby has always specialized in the tales of young, rather lost men in a modern world. "About A Boy," "High Fidelity," et cetera.
Well, this time it's a young, rather lost BOY who is forced to grow up too fast, in Hornby's first foray into young adult fiction, "Slam." It's a gently humorous, rather bewildered story, albeit one that occasionally reads like a sex ed cautionary tale.
Sam is an ordinary kid, from a line of people who always messed up their lives early on. He loves skateboarding, talks to his Tony Hawk poster, wants to be a graphic art designer, and his love life is just starting to bloom. So he's blindsided when his ex-girlfriend Alicia reveals that she's pregnant, and that she intends to keep the baby.
Suddenly Sam is facing Alicia's snobby parents, his shattered dreams, and the fear that he can't be a good dad. Somehow his Tony Hawk poster flashes him months into the future, giving him glimpses of how his life will suddenly twist. And when Alicia has the baby, Sam finds that he needs to grow up in a hurry -- for his son, his parents, and the changes that are happening way too early.
To be honest, my first reaction to "Slam" was a pained groan. Nick Hornby crafts really insightful, unique fiction, and a story about teen pregnancy just seemed so.... simple. After all, there are only a few ways a pregnancy can turn out, and all but one don't make for a very long story.
But Hornby spins the story in his usual laid-back, meditative style, full of contemplative moments and pop culture references. It feels like reading a gently humorous memoir, but one with a painful sting of regret. And Hornby doesn't entirely abandon the "maturing" theme -- it's very much about growing from a child to an adult, and delicately outlines all the conflicting emotions and problems Sam faces.
And surprisingly, though you know pretty much how the story will turn out, Hornby does throw some twists into the story, such as what's going on with Sam's mother. And the whole magical-realism aspect of it -- time travel, the talking poster -- is a little awkward at first, but eventually it settles into the plot nicely.
Sam himself is a likable kid -- he's confused, scared, and tries to be supportive despite not feeling like it. But over time, we see him turning into a young man who will handle his responsibilities. The other characters tend to be thinner -- Alicia is rather whiny, her parents are contemptuous snobs, and Sam's dad is a jerk.
"Slam" is basically a younger version of Hornby's best-loved stories -- the ones that show a boy becoming a man. In this case, literally, and with great sensitivity.
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