Book-Review: "SLAM" by Nick Hornby

Sam is a nice boy who lives with his mum. They live in this little apartment, but the apartment is a nice place to live think Sam. Sam’s mum and dad got Sam when they were only sixteen years old. After they got married they split up, they couldn’t stand each other’s face. Sam loves to skate, not ice skating, but skateboarding in the park. When Sam started to skate he got this Tony Hawk poster of is mum. The poster hangs over his bed in their apartment. When Sam has something on his hart that he would like to talk about, he just talks to the Tony Hawk poster. He has also read the book about Tony Hawk’s life, about five or six times, and he has all the pages and words from the book in his head. When Sam went from fifteen to sixteen he got a girlfriend. She named Alicia, and they were together every single day, and they loved it. They had sex too. Alicia was a beautiful girl, and she loved Sam so much. After some few months Sam got bored with just being around Alicia all the time, so Sam broke up with her. Alicia was heartbroken. She cried, but Sam agreed with himself that this was the only right thing to do. Not long after they had split up Alicia wanted to meat Sam, she had something to tell him, something very important. Sam had made up an idea what Alicia was going to tell him, but he was hoping for the best of course. The little idea that Sam had made up in his mind was not wrong. Alicia was pregnant, and Sam was the father of the baby. Sam was going to be a parent in the age of sixteen, just like his mum and dad. This wasn’t how his life supposes to be, being a father in the age of sixteen. Sam got panic and ran away from home to Hastings, only for a night, but his mum was worried to death. Sam came back home because he had homesickness. When he came back, Alicia had tried to contact Sam, but Sam had thrown his mobile phone in the sea in Hastings. He contacted Alicia when he came home. They told Alicia’s parents about the pregnancy first. Alicia’s parents got very mad, and went home to Sam’s mum and told her what he had done to their daughter, of course it was Sam foul all of this. Sam’s mum wasn’t happy about this. After waiting in nine months Alicia got a boy, and they called him Rufus. Sam lived with them a little wild, he and Alicia got together again, and Sam went to collage again. After a wild he moved out, and he never moved back. One thing that Sam was very worried about was that he didn’t want to lose the contact with his son, only Alicia could stop him from that, and she didn’t. They never went together again. In one dream Sam had, where he was thrown in the future, he got a new girlfriend, and Alicia had got a new boyfriend. Sam’s mum got a baby too, a little girl with Mark, only a year after Rufus was born.
Theme:
This book is about being teenage parents. All the challenged you meet when you get a little baby in the age of sixteen. What are you going to do? How can you live with this? How are you going to take care of the baby and yourself? The book is also about love and relationships. When you get a baby with someone in the age of sixteen, how are you going to live? Are you supposed to live the rest of your life with this person, and if you not are going to live with him or her, are you going to be friends for the baby’s best, or enemies just because he or she didn’t want to live with you? Think about the baby’s best first, then after that you can start to think about yourself. Sam and Alicia consider the situation like this. They handle the situation very well, they ended up being just friends, and that’s good. It’s not good to be in a relationship if you don’t love the other person, you only trick yourself, and the partner gets heartbroken when he or she finds it out.

I think that “SLAM” is a book for teenagers in the age 13-19. Because the book is about teenagers parents, and Sam who is the main character is 16 years. We are meeting Sam’s problem not only with his girlfriend, Alicia, but also his problems with his mum and dad, and problems from school that is usual when you are a teenager. Adults’ people can also read this book, but I’m afraid that it is a little bit boring for them. I mean when Alicia and Sam told their parents that she were pregnant, an adult person know how he or she should respond. So I think that this book is only for teenagers.
I really liked this book a lot. It is so real, and the book is about Sam and Alicia who is about my age when they get into this huge problem. When I say that the book is so real I mean that Nick Hornby has brought all the problems that a teenager can meet, and how they can work things out. The way Hornby tells us all the time what Sam is thinking and what he would like to do or answer, all that is so real. Many teenager boys maybe feel that they are in the same situation, and think that they are not the only one with this huge problem, many teenager boys have it just like them. The book is a very directly book, everything that Sam is thinking and how he does it is so directly described, everything is so perfectly described, just like that! When he describe a thing it is just like that, you can’t see it interpret it another way, only how he has describe it! Not a line or word too much, just a perfect describable book. I enjoyed reading this book, but I didn’t like the ending of the book. A perfect ending would be that Sam and Alicia went back together and married, and lived the rest of their life together happy with Rufus and their other babies. I didn’t like that he were thrown into the future, and that he got another girlfriend, and Alicia another boyfriend. Sam and Alicia are made for each other!